During the cold part of its five-year long mission that ended in May, NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope captured an outlandish eye-shaped galaxy image - that of a coiled galaxy, with its eyelike center harboring a veiled black hole enclosed by a storm of star formation!
The "eye" at the galaxy's center results from a colossal black hole, which is surrounded by a ring of stars - with more new stars emerging at a rampant speed! The black hole, which is almost 100 million times the Sun's mass, is far bigger than the central black hole of our galaxy.
Positioned nearly 50 million light-years from the Earth, the galaxy - called NGC 1097 - is spiral-shaped like our own Milky Way; with stars constituting its stretched, spindly 'arms.'
The new color-coded infrared view from Spitzer shows a blue area around the hidden black hole; long red wavelengths; and a white ring of stars around it. Astronomers opine that a smaller blue galaxy peering through the spiral arms has probably struck a hole in the larger galaxy.
George Helou - Deputy Director of NASA's Spitzer Science Center at Pasadena's California Institute of Technology - said: "The fate of this black hole and others like it is an active area of research. Some theories hold that the black hole might quiet down and eventually enter a more dormant state like our Milky Way black hole."