File:Mrk 573 HST (38563712190).png

English: Note: Michell Revalski, an astronomer who studies these objects, has left comments on some of my images to add further details about what we're looking at! See here, or just scroll down.

Another view detailing the structures present near the center of a galaxy with an active galactic nucleus (AGN). Again a spiral galaxy, although the arms seem to have blended together to form some nesting ring structures. This Hubble imagery only shows the center ring.

I have to say that I am enjoying this focus on AGN even though they are smaller, fainter, noisier images. Though I am having some difficulty understanding them, I am beginning to see their profundity. I imagine the light propagating out from them over many thousands of years, similarly to local light echoes, but on a much larger scale. There are many images of quasar ionization echoes out there, like Hanny's Voorwerp, and those should represent something like this object, but at a time much later when the nuclear accretion has ceased and the AGN has remained quiet for some time. I think, however, any echo from a galaxy like this one might not make it far out, and instead be attenuated by whatever gas and dust it runs into. Point the poles of the accretion disk another way, and the light might not interact much with the disk of the galaxy at all, right? The Universe might operate simply, but supplies us with so many variations on a theme, that sometimes it seems very confusing.

That said, if these are similar to quasar ionization echoes like Hanny's Voorwerp, I wonder if I ought to be making these green. I find it hard to say. Maybe they aren't as green when they are up close to the AGN. I keep ending up with blue tendrils, but that probably has a lot to do with the limited set of filters I have to work with. They do however seem to be very bright in near-ultraviolet light, and are also fairly bright in x-rays, as well. This makes me suspect that blue might more appropriately represent them. Hmm. Who could I even bother to ask such a question of?

A version featuring x-ray data from Chandra is here: https://www.flickr.com/photo.gne?short=24vJJUc

Data from the following proposals were used to create this image: Near Ultraviolet Imaging of Seyfert Galaxies: Understanding the Starburst-AGN Connection High-Spatial Resolution Imaging and Polarization of AGN

Red: WFPC2 / PC F675W Green: WFPC2 / PC F569W Blue: ACS / HRC F330W

North is up.