The image consists of a ring of bright pink and blue dusty material. The ring has bright spots, showing where stars are forming. There are darker patches in the ring, where the dust is too dense for light to pass through. In the middle of the ring, there is a bright pink-yellow glow, with a very bright centre. There is a gap between this glow in the middle and the ring, where the background dark Universe peers through.

ERIS, the Very Large Telescope’s newest infrared eye on the sky, captured this stunning image of the inner ring of the galaxy NGC 1097. This galaxy is located 45 million light-years away from Earth, in the constellation Fornax. ERIS has captured the gaseous and dusty ring that lies at the very centre of the galaxy. The bright spots in the ring are stellar nurseries, shown in unprecedented detail. The centre of this galaxy is active, with a supermassive black hole that feeds off its surroundings. 

This image has been taken through four different filters by ERIS’s state-of-the-art infrared imager, the Near Infrared Camera System — or NIX. The filters have been represented here by blue, green, red and magenta, where the last one highlights the compact regions in the ring. To put NIX’s resolution in perspective, this image shows, in detail, a portion of the sky less than 0.03% the size of the full Moon.

Credit:

ESO/ERIS team

Coordinates
Position (RA):	2 46 19.04
Position (Dec):	-30° 16' 29.13"
Field of view:	0.55 x 0.52 arcminutes
Orientation:	North is 0.4° left of vertical

Colours & filters      Band	Telescope
Infrared J	1.28 μm	Very Large Telescope ERIS
Infrared H2	2.068 μm	Very Large Telescope ERIS
Infrared Ks	2.18 μm	Very Large Telescope ERIS
Infrared Br-g	2.172 μm	Very Large Telescope ERIS