NGC 4151 - HST
The brightly glowing bar portion of NGC 4151 as seen by Hubble. It is a Seyfert galaxy, which means that it has an actively accreting black hole at its nucleus, which presents itself to us as an intensely bright source. The two brighter portions near the top and bottom of the frame are where the bar terminates, and some fainter spiral arms extend outward from them. A widefield view of the galaxy by Adam Block is available to help with context: Click!
Mitchell Revalski of Georgia State University contacted me regarding the possibility of processing some of the objects he is using in his thesis, and I have been looking through the data to see what I can do. What's important in this galaxy are the brightly illuminated and glowing hydrogen clouds near the nucleus. They are a bit difficult to make out in this image because the narrowband filters required to highlight these structures were not available in a matching field of view, but some older WF/PC2 data of only the nucleus was available, so I made use of that in another image.
An article discussing this galaxy using a radio / visible / x-ray light image is available here: www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/chandra/multimedia/11-029.html
Data from the following proposal were used to create this image: A Cepheid-Based Distance to the Benchmark AGN NGC 4151
Color saturation was greatly enhanced for the whole image.
Luminosity: WFC3/UVIS F350LP Red: WFC3/UVIS F814W Green: Pseudo Blue: WFC3/UVIS F555W
North is NOT up. It is 30° counter-clockwise from up.Relevante Bilder
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NGC 4151NGC 4151, auch "Saurons Auge" genannt, ist eine Balken-Spiralgalaxie mit aktivem Galaxienkern vom Hubble-Typ SBab im Sternbild Jagdhunde am Nordsternhimmel. Sie ist schätzungsweise 46 Millionen Lichtjahre von der Milchstraße entfernt und hat einen Durchmesser von etwa 85.000 Lichtjahren. Gemeinsam mit NGC 4156 und PGC 38756 bildet sie das Galaxientrio Holm 345. .. weiterlesen