Lunch in Centaurus

Credit: ESo

This image of the cen­tral parts of Cen­tau­rus A reveals the parallelogram-shaped remains of a smaller galaxy that was gulped down about 200 to 700 mil­lion years ago. Credit: ESo

Cen­tau­rus A catches our atten­tion. With a wide swath of dust obscur­ing its bright cen­ter, Cen­tau­rus A, or NGC 5128, is one of the most stud­ied objects in the south­ern sky. The spec­tac­u­lar band of dust is thought to be all that is left over after a small spi­ral galaxy col­lided with a larger ellip­ti­cal galaxy between 200 mil­lion to 700 mil­lion years ago.

The image on top is how we see the image from Earth. In the image from Euro­pean South­ern Obser­va­tory’s La Silla Obser­va­tory, we see a gas-rich galaxy with an active galac­tic core and scores of new stars. In the new bot­tom image, also from ESO, we see the twisted and warped left­overs of this galac­tic lunch. Astronomers used a new tech­nique using near-infrared images and spe­cial tele­scopes to “see through” the thick dust. Behind that dust, they found a clear ring of stars. The glit­ter­ing halo is all that is left over of the smaller spi­ral galaxy. Those aren’t just stars show­ing up in the ring around Cen­tau­rus A but thou­sands of huge, ancient star clus­ters, each con­tain­ing mil­lions of stars.

Cen­tau­rus A is the near­est giant ellip­ti­cal galaxy. It’s really close to Earth, only 11 mil­lion light years away, toward the con­stel­la­tion Cen­tau­rus the Centaur.

Comments

S 20-11-2009, 10:28

I see a hand full of gold dust splashed across the galaxy…

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