APOD: M106 Close Up (2012 May 03)

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APOD: M106 Close Up (2012 May 03)

Post by APOD Robot » Thu May 03, 2012 4:06 am

Image M106 Close Up

Explanation: Close to the Great Bear (Ursa Major) and surrounded by the stars of the Hunting Dogs (Canes Venatici), this celestial wonder was discovered in 1781 by the metric French astronomer Pierre Mechain. Later, it was added to the catalog of his friend and colleague Charles Messier as M106. Modern deep telescopic views reveal it to be an island universe: a spiral galaxy around 30 thousand light-years across located only about 21 million light-years beyond the stars of the Milky Way. Along with prominent dust lanes and a bright central core, this colorful composite image highlights youthful blue star clusters and reddish stellar nurseries that trace the galaxy's spiral arms. The high resolution galaxy portrait is a mosaic of data from Hubble's sharp ACS camera combined with groundbased color image data. M106 (aka NGC 4258) is a nearby example of the Seyfert class of active galaxies, seen across the spectrum from radio to X-rays. Energetic active galaxies are powered by matter falling into a massive central black hole.

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Re: APOD: M106 Close Up (2012 May 03)

Post by geckzilla » Thu May 03, 2012 4:07 am

Wow, grats on the APOD, Andre! I wonder if this will win the Hidden Treasures contest, as well?
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Re: APOD: M106 Close Up (2012 May 03)

Post by TNT » Thu May 03, 2012 4:23 am

Just wondering... could this galaxy's active center qualify as a quasar?
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Re: APOD: M106 Close Up (2012 May 03)

Post by avdhoeven » Thu May 03, 2012 4:43 am

Wow, I never dared to hope for this..

A full zoomable 35 megapixel version of the image can be found here:

http://zoom.it/zOeR

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Re: APOD: M106 Close Up (2012 May 03)

Post by Ann » Thu May 03, 2012 5:33 am

I'm in a super-hurry, but... congratulations, Andre! It's so well-deserved! It's been a joy to follow your and geckzilla's efforts over at the Observation Deck folder and Hubble's Hidden Treasures thread.

I hope many more people will take a look at the spectacular images that the two of you have processed there! :D

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Re: APOD: M106 Close Up (2012 May 03)

Post by Javachip » Thu May 03, 2012 8:39 am

It appears that the brightly glowing central region has a far lower star density than the spiral arms. Is this just an artifact of image processing? Or have the innermost stars all been devoured?

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Re: APOD: M106 Close Up (2012 May 03)

Post by avdhoeven » Thu May 03, 2012 10:03 am

I'm not sure about that. But when I look at the original hubble images it looks like there is indeed a sort of a pit there with less density.... It looks like the galaxy is thinner in the central part in stead of having a bulge, but I can't explain why. Maybe an astronomer can?

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Re: APOD: M106 Close Up (2012 May 03)

Post by Byork » Thu May 03, 2012 10:26 am

Blue regions in M106 appear to be similar to the Pleiades Association in the Milky Way, only on a larger scale. While blue giant stars predominate in such stellar fields G type stars similar to the Sun must also abound. On any Earth-like terrestrial world in such stellar fields the the night time sky probably appears immersed in blue light reflected from dust clouds and gas in the region.

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Re: APOD: M106 Close Up (2012 May 03)

Post by Moonlady » Thu May 03, 2012 12:47 pm

Stunning...

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Re: APOD: M106 Close Up (2012 May 03)

Post by ta152h0 » Thu May 03, 2012 5:46 pm

The spiral arms look very active, as if comtaining a number of Orion like areas
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Re: APOD: M106 Close Up (2012 May 03)

Post by Boomer12k » Thu May 03, 2012 9:42 pm

ta152h0 wrote:The spiral arms look very active, as if comtaining a number of Orion like areas
I, too, saw some Orion like areas....one looked very similar to the constellation....If you start from the center....a little to the right is a clump of 3 dust trails that goes down to the spiral arm....looking to our right....the next clump of stars has 3 stars that look like Orion's Belt.

Thanks for the PIC...

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Re: APOD: M106 Close Up (2012 May 03)

Post by bystander » Fri May 04, 2012 4:57 pm

APOD: Messier 106 (2011 Mar 19) - http://asterisk.apod.com/viewtopic.php?t=23180
APOD: Messier 106 (2009 May 29) - http://asterisk.apod.com/viewtopic.php?t=16909

APOD: M106 in Canes Venatici (2003 Apr 17)
APOD: M106: A Spiral Galaxy with a Strange Core (2000 Feb 15)

APOD: The Arms of NGC 4258 (2007 Apr 11) - http://asterisk.apod.com/viewtopic.php?t=10911
CXC: NGC 4258: Mysterious Arms Revealed (2007 Apr 10)

A spiral that can beat you with two arms tied behind its back
Discover Blogs | Bad Astronomy | 2012 May 05
Messier 106 is an elongated spiral galaxy, seen by us at a low angle, in the constellation of Canes Venatici (CANE-eez ven-AT-ih-sigh, the hunting dogs). It’s about 25 million light years away, give or take. That may sound far — 250 million trillion kilometers! — but for Hubble, that’s considered close. So if you take a stack of Hubble images of M106 and put them together, as amateur astronomer Andre van der Hoeven did, you get a lovely picture it!
Image
Credits: Hubble/Adrian Zsilavec/Michelle Qualls/Adam Block/NOAO/AURA/NSF,
enhanced with a ground-based image by Adam Block;
Image Processing: Andre van der Hoeven

[Click to galactinate and get access to a zoomable version -- and you want to. I shrank the image considerably to get it to fit here.]

M106 looks a bit odd to my eye. The overall structure is pretty typical for a two-armed spiral seen at this low angle, but still… those red spots mark the location of busy star formation. The hot young stars heat up their surrounding gas, and the hydrogen in them reacts by glowing. Usually you see star formation that intense over a large region of the galaxy, or a small region, but not somewhere in between like this.

Not being familiar with the galaxy, I looked it up, and found the image inset here (which I’ve rotated to better match the Hubble image above). Right away we see something really weird: there are two more arms invisible in the Hubble shot!

What the what?
Image
CXC: NGC 4258: Mysterious Arms Revealed
(Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/Univ. of Maryland/A.S. Wilson et al.;
Optical: Pal.Obs. DSS; IR: NASA/JPL-Caltech; VLA: NRAO/AUI/NSF)

The inset picture is a combination from a lot of telescopes and wavelengths: visible light (displayed as gold), infrared (red), radio (purple) and X-ray (blue). The visible and IR line up well with Hubble’s view, but the radio and X-ray clearly show those extra arms. X-rays are emitted by very hot gas — like, million degrees hot — and radio is emitted by gas with a strong magnetic field permeating it. That’s a hint about what’s going on. Another is that the core of the galaxy is very bright, glowing more fiercely than you’d expect from a normal galaxy.

That adds up to one thing: an actively feeding black hole in the galaxy’s heart. And it’s big: about 40 million times the mass of the Sun. Material from the galaxy is falling onto the black hole, and piling into a huge disk just outside the Final Plunge. This disk is incredibly hot, and for reasons still not entirely understood (but which involve intense magnetic fields) powers twin beams of energy and matter which blast out at high speed in opposite direction. These beams are slamming into and heating up the gas in the galaxy, and that’s what’s lighting up those extra arms. The beams are cone-shaped (think beams from a light house), which is why we only see some of that gas lit up.

Weirdly, the beams are blasting through the disk of the greater galaxy. Usually, the disk of the black hole is roughly aligned with the exterior galaxy itself, so the beams travel "up and down", right out of the galaxy, but clearly that’s not the case here! Also, judging from the power in those beams, if they were aimed at us the core of that galaxy would be really bright, and M106 would be a heckuva lot more famous than it already is. I wonder if it would be naked eye visible? It’s possible.

Funny. There’s hardly a hint of all that incredible energy blasting out, all that drama, in the Hubble image. As detailed and high-resolution as it is, it shows we still need as many eyes on the sky as can muster if we really want to uncover the secrets of the Universe.
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Post by neufer » Fri May 04, 2012 6:17 pm

bystander wrote: A spiral that can beat you with two arms tied behind its back
Discover Blogs | Bad Astronomy | 2012 May 05
Also, judging from the power in those beams, if they were aimed at us the core of that galaxy would be really bright, and M106 would be a heckuva lot more famous than it already is.

I wonder if it would be naked eye visible? It’s possible.

Funny. There’s hardly a hint of all that incredible energy blasting out, all that drama, in the Hubble image.
Since "there’s hardly a hint of all that incredible energy blasting out in the [visible] Hubble image" it is hard to believe that the beams, if they were aimed at us could possibly be naked eye visible. Visible light should scatter off of the dust and UV light should light up the gas.
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