This new image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope is likely the best of the grand-design spiral galaxy NGC 6814.
This Hubble image shows NGC 6814, a face-on grand-design spiral galaxy. Image credit: NASA / ESA / Hubble / Judy Schmidt, www.geckzilla.com.
NGC 6814, also known as LEDA 63545 or 2MASX J19424057-1019255, is an 11.2-magnitude face-on grand-design spiral galaxy.
It lies in the northern constellation Aquila, 74.4 million light-years from Earth.
According to astronomers, “when we look at this galaxy we are looking into and through an inner spiral arm of our own Galaxy.”
“Clouds of gas and dust billow and waft in the foreground of NGC 6814. Thus the reality is that many directions are dimmed or completely hidden from view due to the busy inner workings of our own home.”
“We are lucky that NGC 6814 is an intrinsically bright galaxy and its light skirts some of the thickest clouds of the Milky Way.”
This beautiful galaxy has spectacular sweeping arms, rippled with an intricate pattern of dark dust.
It also has an extremely bright nucleus, a telltale sign that the galaxy is a Seyfert galaxy.
NGC 6814 shows a very stable periodic behavior in the form of repeated X-ray flares, causing astronomers to suspect that it hosts a supermassive black hole with a mass of 18 million solar masses.
As NGC 6814 is a very active galaxy, many regions of ionized gas are studded along its spiral arms.
In these large clouds of gas, a burst of star formation has recently taken place, forging the brilliant blue stars that are visible scattered throughout the galaxy.
This image of NGC 6814 was made from separate exposures taken in the visible and infrared regions of the spectrum with the Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3), a fourth-generation UVIS/IR imager aboard Hubble.
