Celestial hemisphere:  Southern  ·  Constellation: Leo (Leo)  ·  Contains:  NGC 3521
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NGC 3521, Jochen Maes
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NGC 3521, Jochen Maes

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Description

NGC 3521 is a spiral galaxy in the Leo constellation, around 26 million light years from earth.

This specific galaxy is a so called "low-ionization nuclear emission-line region" (LINER) galaxy. In normal people speak, it basically means the following:

Chemical elements have a certain threshold of energy requirements they need to meet in order to ionize (for the sake of simplicity, think of it as energizing them which causes them to radiate). When analyzing the core region of this galaxy, we see emissions from elements you don't necessarily expect (due to their fairly high energy requirements). So that beckons the question, where's all that energy coming from? To the best of our current understanding, there's two options:

1) Supermassive black hole: Most galaxies have one of these in their core region. Dump enough material onto them and you'll have a situation where huge amounts of energy is being emitted.

2) Dense star formation regions: Stars obviously emit energy. Concentrate enough of them in relatively small amount of space (astronomically speaking) and the energy emitted will of course be very focused as well.

Image acquisition details:

15x1800" HA
36x1200" Luminance
20x1200" Red
20x1200" Green
20x1200" Blue

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NGC 3521, Jochen Maes