Chandra Release - December 10, 2009

Visual Description: NGC 6872

This image features two galaxies, NGC 6872 and IC 4970. The image is dominated by violet and red colors, while the shape of the image resembles a spiral galaxy being pulled or stretched out by two of its arms, with some very large bright sources very close by.  NGC 6872 and IC 4970 are two galaxies in the process of colliding and merging.  IC 4970 is a small galaxy at the top of the image that, thanks to Chandra X-ray Observatory (violet) and Spitzer infrared data (red), is shown to contain an active supermassive black hole.  This composite image also includes optical data from the Very Large Telescope, which is mostly in yellow, white and green-grey.  The gravitational attraction from IC 4970 has likely pulled over some of NGC 6872's deep reservoir of cold gas (seen prominently in the red Spitzer data), providing a new fuel supply to power the giant black hole.