NGC1964: More black holes

Galaxies are entities far beyond the power of our little human brains to grasp. Yes, we think that we understand what they are because we see their nucleus and the spiral arms that whirl around it. But do we really realise what it is we're seeing? Do we, for instance, really understand that the billions of stars that make up the Milky Way that spans across the sky only comprises but a small part of our own galaxy? Do we really have any idea what hundreds of billions of stars actually mean? How much is a hundred billion anyway? And given that there are at least a hundred billion galaxies in the visible universe, each containing hundreds of billions of stars, it would be sheer arrogance to state that the Earth lies at the centre of the Universe and that we, tiny humans, are its divine culmination. 

Now point your telescope again to Orion's feet, to the unknown constellation of Lepus, the hare. In my previous post I've shown you an unexpectedly beautiful planetary nebula in that constellation. Now I'd like to show you a distant galaxy there. NGC1964 lies about 65 million light-years away from us. That's not exceptionally distant since our universe has a radius of over 13 billion light-years, but still, the light of this galaxy started its voyage to Earth around the time that the asteroid, which caused the extinction of the dinosaurs, hit us. So that's a considerable distance. The thing that struck me at first glance, was that this galaxy has a very bright, almost stellar-like core. It immediately reminded me of M77, a galaxy which has a particularly big black hole in its nucleus. The strange thing about black holes is that they're not really black as seen from Earth, but as a matter of fact they're very bright. That's because matter clumps together around it, pulled in by its enormous gravitational force, and becomes extremely dense and hot. So when you see a galaxy with a core like this, rest assured that it contains a super-massive black hole!