Dark Rays in IC 5063

This Hubble Space Telescope image of the heart of nearby active galaxy IC 5063 reveals a mixture of bright rays and dark shadows coming from the blazing core, home of a supermassive black hole.

Astronomers suggest that a ring of dusty material surrounding the black hole may be casting its shadow into space.

According to their scenario, this interplay of light and shadow may occur when light blasted by the monster black hole strikes the dust ring, which is buried deep inside the core. Light streams through gaps in the ring, creating the brilliant cone-shaped rays. However, denser patches in the disk block some of the light, casting long, dark shadows through the galaxy.

This phenomenon is similar to sunlight piercing our Earthly clouds at sunset, creating a mixture of bright rays and dark shadows formed by beams of light scattered by the atmosphere.

However, the bright rays and dark shadows appearing in IC 5063 are happening on a vastly larger scale, shooting across at least 36,000 light-years.

IC 5063 resides 156 million light-years from Earth.

The observations were taken on March 7 and Nov. 25, 2019 by Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3 and Advanced Camera for Surveys.

About the colours

These images are a composite of separate exposures acquired by the WFC3/UVIS and ACS instruments on the Hubble Space Telescope. Several filters were used to sample specific wavelength ranges. The color results from assigning different hues (colors) to each monochromatic (grayscale) image associated with an individual filter. In this case, the assigned colors are: Blue: F673N Green: 763M Red: F814W

About the data

The HST observations include those from programs 15609 (G. Fabbiano) and 15444 (A. Barth)