Space photo of the week: Hubble catches a 'baseball galaxy' with a black hole heart

ESO 420-G013's perfectly round disk of stars resembles a baseball. Image credit: (Image credit: NASA/ESA/A. Evans (University of Virginia)/Processing: Gladys Kober (NASA/Catholic University of America))

What it is: ESO 420-G013, an extremely bright face-on spiral galaxy harboring a hungry black hole

When it was taken: Jan. 30, 2024

The image shows a bright core and brownish filaments of dark dust, but the galaxy's almost perfectly round disk is its most notable feature. That's because Hubble, which has been in orbit around Earth since 1990, just happens to have a direct face-on view of ESO 420-G013.

Besides being a fine example of a spiral galaxy, ESO 420-G013 is a Seyfert galaxy. Named after American astronomer Carl Keenan Seyfert, who researched the objects in 1943, a Seyfert galaxy has an extremely bright, point-like active galactic nucleus powered by a supermassive black hole, according to a NASA statement. Deep within ESO 420-G013, its hungry black hole is pulling in surrounding material and sending out powerful radiation. It's also forming new stars at a high rate.

A zoomed-in view of the face-on spiral galaxy ESO 420-G013 (Image credit: NASA/ESA/A. Evans (University of Virginia)/Processing: Gladys Kober (NASA/Catholic University of America))

Seyfert galaxies like this one are visible in the infrared — wavelengths of light beyond those visible to humans in the electromagnetic spectrum — which Hubble can detect thanks to its Wide Field Camera 3, which is sensitive to ultraviolet, visible and infrared light.