The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has taken a picture of the galaxy UGC 6093.
This image, captured by Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3, shows the megamaser galaxy UGC 6093. Image credit: NASA / ESA / Hubble.
UGC 6093, also known as LEDA 33198 and SDSS J110047.95+104341.3, lies in the constellation Leo at a distance of 500 million light-years.
This galaxy is classified as a barred spiral galaxy — it has beautiful arms that swirl outwards from a bar slicing through the galaxy’s center.
It is also classified as an active galaxy, which means that it hosts an active galactic nucleus, or AGN: a compact region at a galaxy’s center within which material is dragged towards a supermassive black hole.
As this black hole devours the surrounding matter it emits intense radiation, causing it to shine brightly.
But UGC 6093 is more exotic still.
The entire galaxy essentially acts as an astronomical laser that beams out microwave emission rather than visible light (hence the ‘m’ replacing the ‘l’).
This type of object is dubbed a megamaser.
Megamasers such as UGC 6093 are intensely bright, around 100 million times brighter than the masers found in galaxies like our Milky Way Galaxy.
This new image of UGC 6093 is made up of observations from Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) in the infrared and optical parts of the spectrum.
Four filters were used to sample various wavelengths.
The color results from assigning different hues to each monochromatic image associated with an individual filter.
