This is a newly released Hubble image of the Lagoon Nebula, otherwise known as Messier 8 and the star cluster NGC 6523. It lies 4,500 light-years away in the constellation Sagittarius. Image credit: NASA, ESA, J. Trauger (Jet Propulson Laboratory).This new NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image shows the Lagoon Nebula, an object with a deceptively tranquil name. The region is filled with intense winds from hot stars, churning funnels of gas, and energetic star formation, all embedded within an intricate haze of gas and pitch-dark dust.
Despite careful searches with the Hubble and Chandra space telescopes, astronomers have been unable to find a presumed supermassive black hole at the heart of a giant galaxy.
In a Hubble Space Telescope survey of 2,753 young, blue star clusters in the neighbouring Andromeda Galaxy (M31), astronomers have found that M31 and our own galaxy have a similar percentage of newborn stars based on mass. The intensive survey was a unique collaboration between astronomers and “citizen scientists,” volunteers who provided invaluable help in analysing the mountain of data from Hubble.
A near-record 17-billion-solar-mass black hole discovered in a sparse area of the local universe indicates that these monster objects may be more common than once thought. The newly discovered supermassive black hole is in NGC 1600, an elliptical galaxy in the constellation Eridanus some 149 million light-years away.