Hubble’s image of NGC 4951 highlights its bright spiral arms and active galactic core, providing important data for studying the galaxy’s evolution. In this new image of galaxy NGC 4951 taken by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, bright spiral arms of stars surround the active galactic center.

Located in the constellation Virgo, NGC 4951 is approximately 50 million light-years away from Earth. It is classified as a Seyfert galaxy; This means that it is an extremely energetic type of galaxy with an active galactic nucleus (AGN). But Seyfert galaxies differ from other types of AGN because the galaxy itself is still clearly visible; The different types of AGN are so bright that it is almost impossible to observe the actual galaxy in which they reside.

AGNs like NGC 4951 are powered by supermassive black holes. As matter spirals towards a black hole, it produces radiation across the electromagnetic spectrum, causing AGNs to glow brightly.

Hubble helped prove that supermassive black holes exist at the center of almost every galaxy in our universe. Before the telescope was launched into Earth orbit in 1990, astronomers had only assumed its existence. The mission confirmed their existence by observing the undeniable effects of black holes, such as jets of material ejected from black holes and disks of gas and dust orbiting these black holes at very high speeds.

These observations of NGC 4951 were taken to provide valuable data to astronomers studying how galaxies evolve, with a particular focus on the star formation process. Hubble collected this information, combined with observations from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), to support the JWST Treasury program. Treasury programs collect observations focusing on the potential to address multiple scientific problems with a single, coherent data set, enabling a variety of interesting scientific studies.