This fantastic image captured by the Hubble Space Telescope shows a galaxy known as NGC 3156. It is located about 73 million light-years from Earth in the small equatorial constellation Sextana.
NGC 3156 is a lenticular galaxy with two visible filaments of dark reddish-brown dust crossing the disk of the galaxy. This type of galaxy gets its name from their lens-like appearance when viewed from the side or edge. They fall somewhere between elliptical and spiral galaxies and have properties of both.
Similar to spirals, lenticular galaxies have a central bulge of stars and a large disk surrounding it. They often have dark dust bands like spirals, but do not have large spiral arms. Similar to ellipticals, lenticular galaxies have mostly older stars and little star formation.
Astronomers have studied NGC 3156 in many ways, from its cohort of globular clusters (roughly spherical groups of stars bound together by their gravitational pull), to the stars being destroyed by the supermassive black hole at its heart.
Using Hubble data, they compared stars near the galaxy’s core with stars in galaxies with black holes of the same size. They found that NGC 3156 has a higher than average percentage of stars swallowed up by its supermassive black hole compared to its peers.
