Added 1 new A* page:I gotta go practice my ink work but I came across a supermassive science thing accidentally over the weekend so I'm gonna try to do that fast. Go!
The zig-zag shape of this 1997 Hubble spectrograph of the core of galaxy Messier 84
image by NASA, Gary Bower, Richard Green (NOAO), the STIS Instrument Definition Team (source)
told scientists that the hot radiating gas at the galaxy's center was whipping around at 880,000 miles per hour within 26 light years of the core, and doing the math on that showed that there must be about 300 million solar masses at the center of it--a really big supermassive black hole (supermassive black hole Sgr A* at the center of the Milky Way is "only" 4 million solar masses).
Galaxy M84 is a lenticular galaxy, and I've talked about those fuzzy kinds of spiral galaxies before. Without clearly defined spiral arms, they can look a little boring (although I have some nice ones under that last link), and M84 isn't really an exception; here is it in visible light by Hubble:
image by NASA (source)
On the other hand, if you look at it in other bandwidths, as done here with X-ray data from Chandra in blue and radio data from the Very Large Array in red (in front of a background seen in visible light by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey), it gets a little more interesting:
image by: X-ray (NASA/CXC/MPE/A.Finoguenov et al.); Radio (NSF/NRAO/VLA/ESO/R.A.Laing et al); Optical (SDSS) (source)
In those wavelengths you can see huge lobes of hot gas being pushed out of the galaxy by the two jets coming off the poles of that big supermassive black hole at the center!
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