The graceful, winding arms of the majestic spiral galaxy NGC 3147 appear like a grand spiral staircase sweeping through space in this Hubble Space Telescope image. They are actually long lanes of young blue stars, pinkish nebulas, and dust in silhouette.
The beauty of the galaxy belies the fact that at its very center is a malnourished black hole surrounded by a thin, compact disk of stars, gas, and dust that have been caught up in a gravitational maelstrom. The black hole’s gravity is so intense that anything that ventures near it gets swept up in the disk.
The disk is so deeply embedded in the black hole’s intense gravitational field that the light from the gas disk is modified, according to Einstein’s theories of relativity, giving astronomers a unique peek at the dynamic processes close to a black hole.
NGC 3147 is located 130 million light-years away in the northern circumpolar constellation Draco the Dragon.
Image:
Data Details:
All data was taken from the Hubble proposal 15145: “The Hubble Constant to 1%: Physics beyond LambdaCDM”
Red: F160W
Green: F814W
Blue: F555WProcessing
Linear processing:
- The broadband channels were combined into an RGB image and then color calibrated
- The RGB image was denoised using TGV and MMT
Non-linear Processing:
- The RGB image was stretched using GHS
- Saturation increase of bright unsaturated areas
- HDR multiscale transformation
- Local Histogram equalization
- Saturation increase of bright unsaturated areas
- Noise reduction using MLT
- HDR multiscale transformation
- Sharpening using MMT and unsharpmask
- Curves transformation