Check out the picture above. The barred spiral galaxy NGC 6872 is interacting with a smaller galaxy to its upper left. The smaller galaxy has likely taken gas from NGC 6872 to feed the supermassive black hole at its center.
To celebrate the 25th anniversary of NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory launch, the Chandra team released this new image of NGC 6872, a spiral galaxy in the Pavo (Peacock) constellation, on July 22, 2024. This image and 24 others, which all include data from Chandra, show how X-ray astronomy explores the universe.
NGC 6872 is 522,000 light-years across, making it more than five times the size of the Milky Way. In 2013, astronomers from the United States, Chile, and Brazil found it to be the largest-known spiral galaxy, based on data from NASA’s Galaxy Evolution Explorer. This record was later broken by NGC 262, a galaxy that is 1.3 million light-years in diameter.
