Exploring the Inner Sanctum of the Supermassive Black Hole in NGC1097

January 3, 2006

The active galaxy NGC 1097 located about 47 million light-years away.

Artist's conception of NGC 1097's inner ring structure which is about 4,500 light-years in diameter. This is the region where several thousand spectra were obtained with the Gemini Multi-object Spectrograph to understand the detailed motion of this gas.