NASA - Image Credit: Mark Hanson; Data: Mike Selby
Why do some spiral galaxies have a ring around the center? Spiral galaxy NGC 1398 not only has a ring of pearly stars, gas and dust around its center, but a bar of stars and gas across its center, and spiral arms that appear like ribbons farther out. The featured deep image from Observatorio El Sauce in Chile shows the grand spiral galaxy in impressive detail. NGC 1398 lies about 65 million light years distant, meaning the light we see today left this galaxy when dinosaurs were disappearing from the Earth. The photogenic galaxy is visible with a small telescope toward the constellation of the Furnace (Fornax). The ring near the center is likely an expanding density wave of star formation, caused either by a gravitational encounter with another galaxy, or by the galaxy’s own gravitational asymmetries.
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That’s beautiful thank you for sharing.
If you copy the link of the fullsize image and paste it to the URL when you’re creating the post, it will embed the image so it will show the thumbnail.
I did, it’s showing for me, is it not for you? What client are you using?
Oh weird. I’m just on the web browser right now. It shows a thumbnail like normal, but it’s black and doesn’t expand like normal. Could be an issue on my end though
Awesome image, this kind of stuff always makes me think about the fractal nature of the universe… Everything just seems like a bigger/smaller version of something else. All that matters is perspective.
Ah, good old NGC 1398. A fitting designation…
Incredible that such a spectacular and beautiful thing is relatively common enough not to have been assigned some special name.
I think that by the time we were able to see things this far away we realised just how many things there were!
And the grey dust around it? No ionization?