Step aside, Shark Week. NASA's Black Hole Week is our favorite celebration of really cool (and sometimes terrifying) things. This year, it's starting us on quite a beautiful note with a new Hubble Space Telescope image of the dazzling spiral galaxy NGC 4951, located 50 million light-years away in the constellation Virgo. Peaceful? At first glance, perhaps. But remember, this is Black Hole Week — so, of course, this picturesque galaxy has what NASA describes as a "voracious black hole" at its core.
NGC 4951 has an active galactic nucleus (AGN), which means it's radiating extreme amounts of energy. And, if you guessed that it's the black hole creating that eruption of energy, you'd be correct. However, NGC 4951 is also a Seyfert galaxy. Whereas most AGNs are so bright, the light they emit drowns out the galaxies themselves. Seyfert galaxies, on the other hand, remain visible to us — and that's what makes NGC 4951 such a photogenic subject for Hubble.
