Explanation: What's the closest active galaxy to planet Earth? That would be Centaurus A, only 11 million light-years distant. Spanning over 60,000 light-years, the peculiar elliptical galaxy is also known as NGC 5128. Forged in a collision of two otherwise normal galaxies, Centaurus A's fantastic jumble of young blue star clusters, pinkish star forming regions, and imposing dark dust lanes are seen here in remarkable detail. The colorful galaxy portrait was recorded under clear Chilean skies at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory. Near the galaxy's center, left over cosmic debris is steadily being consumed by a central black hole with a billion times the mass of the Sun. As in other active galaxies, that process likely generates the radio, X-ray, and gamma-ray energy radiated by Centaurus A.
Centaurus A belongs to the astronomical Hall of Fame, so it is one of those objects that get photographed so often that you can get tired of them. But to me, this is an unusually nice image. The galaxy is "turned upside down" compared with what it usually looks like in images - not that there is any real up or down in space, of course - which in itself gives it a fresh look.
And the image does an unusually good job at bringing out the star formation in the dust lane. Virtually all Cen A images show the star formation along the lower right edge of the dust lane - in most images the star formation is seen along the upper right edge - but many pictures don't bring out the star formation on the left side of the dust lane. Here, the left side of the dust lane is peppered with pink and red emission nebulae and blue clusters. Nice!
Perhaps because the image does such a good job of bringing out the dust lane, I can actually see the dust lane wrapping itself around the main elliptical body of Cen A. To me, this feels a little like seeing the famous Hubble image of M104 and suddenly seeing the dust lane curve all around the galaxy's bulge. In other words, today's APOD feels quite three-dimensional to me!
But there is a problem here which I hope is fixed soon. I am unable to open the larger version of the image.
Anyway, nice APOD!
Ann
Re: APOD: Centaurus A (2012 Apr 04)
Posted: Wed Apr 04, 2012 6:00 am
by owlice
I was able to open the larger (knock your socks off!) image, so it's working; it opens in a new window.
Re: APOD: Centaurus A (2012 Apr 04)
Posted: Wed Apr 04, 2012 6:10 am
by Ann
I tried to open it with Opera, and then I tried to open it with Explorer. None of them works.
Ann
Re: APOD: Centaurus A (2012 Apr 04)
Posted: Wed Apr 04, 2012 6:15 am
by Guest
I could not open the full-size image because there is a trailing space in front of the file name. When I removed it, I could see Centaurus A in full glory.
Ooooh, yeah, I opened it from the starshadows site.
Re: APOD: Centaurus A (2012 Apr 04)
Posted: Wed Apr 04, 2012 8:54 am
by Flase
Guest wrote:I could not open the full-size image because there is a trailing space in front of the file name. When I removed it, I could see Centaurus A in full glory.
Yes somebody should edit that.
The centre of this galaxy always reminds me of Turner.
Re: APOD: Centaurus A (2012 Apr 04)
Posted: Wed Apr 04, 2012 9:29 am
by neufer
Flase wrote:
The centre of this galaxy always reminds me of Turner.
<<Joseph Mallord William Turner ["the painter of light"] is regarded as a Romantic preface to Impressionism. High levels of ash in the atmosphere from the eruption of Mount Tambora in 1815, led to unusually spectacular sunsets that were an inspiration for some of Turner's work.
J. M. W. Turner was born on or around the 23 April 1775 [Shakespeare's 211 the birthday!] in Covent Garden, London. His father, William Turner, was a barber and wig maker; his mother, Mary Marshall, came from a family of butchers. As Turner grew older, Turner became more eccentric. He had few close friends except for his father, who lived with him for 30 years, eventually working as his studio assistant. He died in the house of his mistress Sophia Caroline Booth in Chelsea on 19 December 1851. He is said to have uttered the last words "The sun is God" before expiring>>
Re: APOD: Centaurus A (2012 Apr 04)
Posted: Wed Apr 04, 2012 11:03 am
by Beyond
That's strange, i have IE9 and opened the Big image about 12:25am, but now i get a 404 page not found. Ahh, the wacky world of computers
Re: APOD: Centaurus A (2012 Apr 04)
Posted: Wed Apr 04, 2012 12:43 pm
by orin stepanek
Hmm! I was able to open all the links. Seems like a nice place to visit; but I wouldn't want to live there.
Ann wrote:Centaurus A ...is one of those objects that get photographed so often that you can get tired of them.
Yes, I am tired of looking at images of Centaurus A.... I'm ready to go there! Come on 21st Century, get your act together and come up with inter-galactic travel.
The image at http://www.obspm.fr/actual/nouvelle/mar09/cena-f1.jpg clearly shows the central black hole's ejecta. I went looking because I couldn't quite make out the faint reverse-S just to the right of that local star with its large ccd spikes.
Re: APOD: Centaurus A (2012 Apr 04)
Posted: Wed Apr 04, 2012 2:53 pm
by Psnarf
[Apparently, we were all composing quick replies at the same time. Sorry for the redundancy. -Department of Redundancy Department]
Using the diameter of the galaxy as a 60,000 light-year ruler, my brain is boggling by those 50,000+ jets of X-rays that cool of at the ends down to hot-microwave/cool-infrared radiation.
--
Boggled
Re: APOD: Centaurus A (2012 Apr 04)
Posted: Wed Apr 04, 2012 3:28 pm
by neufer
Psnarf wrote:
Using the diameter of the galaxy as a 60,000 light-year ruler, my brain is boggling by those 50,000+ jets of X-rays that cool of at the ends down to hot-microwave/cool-infrared radiation.
It is not really thermal radiation.
Rather, these are relativistic particle jets making:
X-rays (blue) due to particle collisions and
submillimeter (orange) synchrotron radiation
due to magnetic field "collisions."
Re: APOD: Centaurus A (2012 Apr 04)
Posted: Wed Apr 04, 2012 5:42 pm
by Pastorian
neufer wrote:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._M._W._Turner wrote:
<<Joseph Mallord William Turner ["the painter of light"] ... He is said to have uttered the last words "The sun is God" before expiring>>
Beautiful!
Re: APOD: Centaurus A (2012 Apr 04)
Posted: Wed Apr 04, 2012 6:16 pm
by Ann
Thanks for the Turner tidbits! Yes, why not - Cen A does show a slight semblance to the splendor of the Turner paintings!
It's particularly closeup shots like this that remind me of Turner
Re: APOD: Centaurus A (2012 Apr 04)
Posted: Thu Apr 05, 2012 2:58 pm
by Psnarf
Thank you, Dr.Neuendorffer.
The ESA images you posted answer another question. The sub-millimeter jets appear at the tip of the x-ray jets in the image from obspm.fr. I wanted to know if the orange tips at 50,000+ light-years were ejected before the x-ray stage, or if the sub-millimeter tips were a result of some sort of conversion process 40,000 years after those particles left the galactic plane. The ESA images clearly show a continuous sub-millimeter jet that is overwhelmed or occulted by the brighter x-ray jet. The bottom x-ray jet looks more like a bubble in the isolated ESA image, providing more questions than answers.
Just what is going on near the event horizon and beyond still shuts down my left-hemisphere. Everything inside the nucleae gets stripped and shot away at the poles, leaving only whatever causes gravity remaining that gets past the event horizon, where spacetime is so wacky that all forward time lines are directed at the singularity where there seems to be no space at all.
The component images that make up this new multi-wavelength composite of Centaurus A. Clear correlation is seen between the jet features at far-infrared wavelengths and how they interact with their surroundings in the visible light view from the Very Large Telescope of the European Southern Observatory.
Credits: Far-infrared: ESA/Herschel/PACS/SPIRE/C.D. Wilson, MacMasterUniversity, Canada; X-ray: ESA/XMM-Newton/EPIC; visible: ESO/MPG 2.2-m telescope on La Silla
I suppose I prefer to think of Centaurus A as a lenticular, not an elliptical. Elliptical seems like way too much of a stretch for such a colorful galaxy.