#m77

The heart of galaxy M77 shines brightly in this May 7, 2026, image from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. The intense glow is due to gas being pulled by the strong gravity of the central black hole into a tight and rapid orbit around it. The motion of the gas causes it to heat up, releasing tremendous amounts of radiation. The bright lines radiating out of the center are diffraction spikes. The spikes are not a physical feature of the galaxy, but an optical effect caused by the telescope itself. (from NASA’s official website.)

cosmic fingerprint: magnetic fields

M77

“Magnetic fields in NGC 1068, or M77, are shown as streamlines over a visible light and X-ray composite image of the galaxy from the Hubble Space Telescope, NuSTAR or the Nuclear Spectroscopic Array, and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. The magnetic fields align along the entire length of the massive spiral arms — 24,000 light years across (0.8 kiloparsecs) — implying that the gravitational forces that created the galaxy’s shape are also compressing its magnetic field. This supports the leading theory of how the spiral arms are forced into their iconic shape known as “density wave theory.” SOFIA, the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy, studied the galaxy using far-infrared light (89 microns) to reveal facets of its magnetic fields that previous observations using visible and radio telescopes could not detect.

Image Credit: NASA/SOFIA; NASA/JPL-Caltech/Roma Tre Univ.”