A few years back I was working on creating educational products for the NASA orbiting observatories Fermi and Swift. These look at super-violent high-energy objects like exploding stars and black holes gobbling down matter. All big galaxies have supermassive black holes in their cores, and some are sloppy eaters, spewing out vast amounts of energy as the material makes The Final Plunge.
I remember finding images of one such galaxy, simply called the Circinus Galaxy, and being baffled as to why I had never heard of it or could find so little info on it. It’s only 14 million light years away, close for a galaxy! Turns out, it’s heavily obscured to visible light telescopes because it happens to lie in the plane of our own galaxy, and we have to look through lots of thick dust to see it. That dims the light a lot! But infrared light can pierce through that dust, making this an interesting object at wavelengths invisible to the human eye, colors that happen to be the specialty of NASA’s WISE spacecraft. So when astronomers took a look, well, behold!
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