🕳️ Black hole
Centaurus A
A giant black hole at the heart of the closest active galaxy.
- Distance
- 11 million light-years away
Did you know?
- It is the closest “active” galaxy: the black hole at its centre is feeding, surrounded by a disc of hot gas 130 light-years across.
- The galaxy seems to have formed when two ordinary galaxies collided.
- It is one of the brightest galaxies in the sky, and can be seen with binoculars from the southern half of Earth.
Photographed or visited by
Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope
Sweeps the whole sky for gamma rays, every three hours.
More NASA photos of Centaurus AStraight from NASA’s image library, in the app
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All of deep space
The Sun
Our star, an ordinary one that keeps everything here alive.
Betelgeuse
A red supergiant in Orion that will one day explode.
Alpha Centauri
The closest star system to the Sun.
Eta Carinae
A pair of giant stars, one of them about 90 times heavier than the Sun.
Mira
A red giant star racing through space with a tail like a comet.
Zeta Ophiuchi
A runaway star, flung out when its partner exploded.