Lenticular Galaxy NGC 5972 in Serpens Caput | Hubble Space Telescope
Twisting in the darkness like a disturbed double helix, lenticular galaxy NGC 5972 exhibits a remarkable structure of ionized gas. It appears to be reeling in space as a result of a huge disturbance, possibly a merger with another galaxy.
A lenticular, means "lens-shaped," galaxy occupies an intermediate position between elliptical and spiral galaxies in the Hubble Classification scheme.
The sweeping trails of gas—H-alpha and doubly ionized oxygen—would both usually be expected in areas of star creation and destruction—reach out into space far beyond the stars that comprise the main body of the galaxy.
Aside from its intriguing tendrils, NGC 5972 also plays host to an active galactic nucleus (AGN). This means a supermassive black hole resides at the center of the galaxy, and the accretion disc around this monster’s genocidal jaws is rotated with such ferocity that twin beams of plasma are ejected in opposite directions out into the depths of space at close to the speed of light. Because of the vast sums of energy involved, this process can be imaged most effectively in the radio wavelengths, and doing so produces images of structures that are of indescribable magnitudes.
In this image, a quasar beam has caused once-invisible filaments in deep space to glow through a process called photoionization. Oxygen, helium, nitrogen, sulfur and neon in the filaments absorb light from the quasar and slowly re-emit it over many thousands of years. The unmistakable emerald hue is caused by ionized oxygen. It glows green.
Picture a region about the size of the solar system, pouring out 100 to 1,000 times as much light as an entire galaxy containing a hundred billion stars, generating a glow that outshines its host galaxy and everything in it. These objects are called quasars. They are distant galaxies whose incredibly bright cores are powered by supermassive black holes. Quasars have been found with luminosities between 10 to 100,000 times that of our Milky Way galaxy, generated from an area just a few light-days to a few light-years across.
Quasars occur when immense amounts of matter fall into a supermassive black hole, spiraling around it in the form of a disk before entering. This “accretion disk” is subjected to extreme gravitational and frictional forces, causing the gas and dust to heat up to millions of degrees and become luminous, blasting out dazzling jets of material into the universe. Together, the jets and glowing disk outshine their host galaxies.
Image Processor Judy Schmidt: "Decided to reprocess this galaxy because I've learned a lot since the last time I processed it . . . I also wanted to show more of the galaxy itself to give more context to the glowing green and red (ionized oxygen and hydrogen, respectively) gas in the center. It's a highly disturbed galaxy . . ."
"The signal for everything but that glowing gas is pretty weak in the Hubble data, so I ended up using the Legacy Survey data to add in some more signal for the galaxy itself. I removed all other sources except for the galaxy since, visually, it matters less that it's lower resolution. A star will look like a fuzzy blob, but an already fuzzy object won't suffer near as much, at least from an aesthetic point of view. It blends well with the Hubble data this way."
Image Processing: Judy Schmidt
Release Date: Aug. 10, 2026
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