Astronomy Picture of the Day: NGC 4258 is not content with the usual two spiral arms. It grew a spare pair!

 

#NASA, #Space, #astronomy, #διάστημα

Black Hole Those extra “anomalous” arms are not starry lanes like the rest of the disk. They are ribbons of hot gas, carved by jets blasting out of the galaxy’s central supermassive black hole. When the jets slam into the disk, they send shockwaves ripping through the gas—cosmic sonic booms that heat and sculpt structures mimicking spiral arms. This composite catches the chaos in three wavelengths: Chandra X-rays (royal blue): million-degree shock fronts from the black hole’s jets Hubble optical light (red, yellow, pale blue): stars and the familiar spiral disk Webb infrared (orange): dusty filaments threading the galaxy M106, about 26 million light-years away, is a close-up lesson in black-hole feedback: a compact engine at the center rewriting the architecture of an entire galaxy. Image credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/SAO; Optical: NASA/ESA/STScI; Infrared: NASA/ESA/CSA/STScI; Image Processing: NASA/CXC/SAO/L. Frattare