Featured Image: An Active Past for a Milky-Way Twin?

What would the Milky Way look like if the supermassive black hole at its center was a little more active? This stunning HST/WFC3 image of NGC 6744, spanning 160 x 160 (click for the whole view), may provide us with a reasonable guess! NGC 6744 is a nearby galaxy thats morphologically very similar to our own with the exception of the presence of an apparent low-luminosity active galactic nucleus at its center. The image to the right is a 10 x 10 zoom-in on the core of this galaxy, which was recently studied with the Gemini South Multi-Object Spectrograph by a team of scientists led by Patrcia da Silva (University of So Paulo, Brazil). The authors observations suggest that this galaxys nucleus was more luminous in the past perhaps as a result of a merger and has now settled down. For more information, check out the article below.CitationPatrcia da Silva et al 2018 ApJ 861 83. doi:10.3847/1538-4357/aac6e3