Paula Cleggett-Haleim

Headquarters, Washington, D.C. August 29, 1990

(Phone: 202/453-1547) 1 p.m. EDT

Randee Exler
Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
(Phone: 301/286-7277)

Ray Villard
Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, Md.
(Phone: 301/338-4514)

RELEASE: 90-118

HUBBLE SPACE TELESCOPE PEERS INTO CORE OF DISTANT GALAXY

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, a cooperative program with

the European Space Agency, has provided a remarkably new detailed
view of the core of a galaxy which lies 40 million light-years
away, more than half way to the great Virgo cluster of galaxies.
These results promise that astronomers will be able to use the
Hubble Space Telescope to probe the mysterious centers of
galaxies, in a search for massive black holes.

The image, taken with the Wide Field and Planetary Camera on
August 17, reveals that stars are much more tightly concentrated
at the center of the galaxy than was previously expected. Since
the galaxy, cataloged as NGC 7457, is assumed to be a "typical"
galaxy, these preliminary findings suggest that the nuclei of
normal galaxies may be more densely packed with stars than
previously thought.

HST scientists are greatly encouraged by this new

observation and emphasize that it demonstrates intriguing science
can be routinely accomplished with the spaceborne observatory.
"The images of NGC 7457 show emphatically that research on nuclei
of galaxies can still be done", says Tod Lauer, of the Wide Field
and Planetary Camera imaging team. "We've never been able to
study any galaxy outside of our Local Group, our "neighborhood"
of about two dozen galaxies, at this resolution before," he said.

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- 2 -
 The centers of galaxies are extremely interesting to
astronomers because the centers are at the heart of the violent
processes that give rise to cosmic jets, quasars, Seyfert
galaxies and other mysterious energetic behavior.

NGC 7457 is a quiescent galaxy picked for its "normality" as

an early target for assessing the science performance of HST.
The resulting images show, to the surprise of astronomers, that
an exceptionally bright and compact core is embedded in the
diffuse background of the rest of the galaxy. Based on this new
image, the stars in the nucleus of NGC 7457 are crowded together
at least 30,000 times more densely than those stars seen within
our own galactic neighborhood. This extraordinarily high stellar
density exceeds earlier estimates from ground-based observation
of NGC 7457 by a factor of 400.

It is far from clear whether or not a massive black hole is

at the center of NGC 7457, since the images alone do not provide
the answer. But these new data suggest that NGC 7457 is an
excellent place to use the HST's spectrographs to measure how
much mass is concentrated at the center of the galaxy.

The Space Telescope Science Institute is operated by the

Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., for
NASA, under contract with the Goddard Space Flight Center,
Greenbelt, Md.
- end -

NASA news releases and other NASA information is available

electronically on CompuServe and GEnie, the General Electric
Network for Information Exchange. For information on CompuServe,
call 1-800-848-8199 and ask for representative 176. For
information on GEnie, call 1-800/638-9636.

Media representatives only can obtain photographs to

illustrate this news story by calling 202/453-8375.

B & W: 90-H-555
TO: MDS/PRA Group
1615 L Street, N.W. - Suite 100
Washington, D.C. 20036

DATE & TIME: AUGUST 29, 1990

ORDERED BY: Edward Campion

NASA Headquarters/LMD
400 Maryland Avenue, SW
Washington, DC 20546 PHONE: 202/453-8400

PROJECT TITLE: Release No: 90-118

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