The Dusty Mysteries of NGC 4696

This is NGC 4696, an

NGC 4696 credit: ESA/Hubble and NASA
This is NGC 4696, an ancient ball of old and dying stars 150 million light years away. This elliptical galaxy lurks in the Centaurus Galaxy Cluster.
It has a wonderful ‘S’ shaped lane of dust winding its way for 30,000 light years around the nucleus of the galaxy. This dust lane is also home to wispy clouds of hydrogen that has been ionized, which is electrons being knocked off of an atom by, say, ultraviolet radiation for instance, making the atoms Ions.
Right in the centre of the galaxy lies its supermassive black hole; unlike a high percentage of galaxies in the universe it is active and drawing in material from around it, surrounding itself with an ‘accretion’ disk of material such as stars, gas and dust. This material while on its one-way trip down into oblivion creates friction as it rubs up against other material in the disk; this releases massive amounts of radiation in the shorter – and very energetic – wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum, such as gamma rays, ultraviolet and x-rays. The magnetic field being generated at the nucleus forces radiation out as jets of ...