Space.com
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Scientists have captured a stunning new image of a massive galaxy ringed by dust filaments.
In the image, Centaurus A, which is located more than 12 million light-years away from Earth in the southern constellation Centaurus (the centaur), ripples across space. The galaxy, which was first identified in 1826, is among the best studied in the southern sky because it is so bright and relatively close to Earth.
In the image, although stars glow, swaths of the galaxy are hidden by dust tendrils looping around the galaxy’s center, where a supermassive black holecontaining 55 million times the mass of the sun, hides and spews out a jet of matter that acts as a bright source of radio light.