Today’s image comes from 13 million light-years away, via the European Organisation for Astronomical Research in the Southern Hemisphere. Combining new data from the Atacama Pathfinder Experiment (APEX) with visible and X-ray observations produces this picture.

As the Bad Astronomy blog explains:

The composite image is false color. The visible light (shown in more or less true color) is from stars and gas in the galaxy (and foreground stars in our own galaxy). The blue is from Chandra, showing high energy X-rays. See how the jets are blue near the center? When they erupt from near the black hole they have tremendous energy and glow in X-rays. Measurements of how the gas is behaving indicate that the gas is moving outwards from the core at half the speed of light.

The APEX results are presented in this paper.

Credit: ESO/WFI (Optical); MPIfR/ESO/APEX/A.Weiss et al. (Submillimetre); NASA/CXC/CfA/R.Kraft et al. (X-ray).