Celestial hemisphere:  Southern  ·  Constellation: Fornax (For)  ·  Contains:  HD17321  ·  NGC 1097
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Optical Jets of NGC1097, Tim Hutchison
Optical Jets of NGC1097, Tim Hutchison

Optical Jets of NGC1097

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Optical Jets of NGC1097, Tim Hutchison
Optical Jets of NGC1097, Tim Hutchison

Optical Jets of NGC1097

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When my friend @Kevin Morefield shared this data of NGC1097 with me I was excited to begin processing an object that I had never seen before.  To my surprise, there were some strange things going on that, at first, I thought where an issue with the data, some kind of strange reflection or artifact.  But I know Kevin's data to be stellar (no pun intended), so I looked into it further.  After my reading, it became my goal to bring these out.

It turns out that there are 4 "optical jets" in NGC1097 that have been the stuff of much debate and study.  In this image, I was able to bring out 3 of them, though the third is very faint and is more visible in the extreem stretch of the inverted L that I placed in the mouseover.  In a paper published by Wehrle, Jones, and Keel published in 1997, they determined that "[b]ased on the optical and radio imaging presented we believe it is unlikely that the optical jets of NGC 1097 were formed directly or indirectly from the ejection of matter from an active galactic nucleus.  The optical emissions from the jets originates in stars, possibly torn from the main body of the galaxy through tidal interactions with NGC 1097A.. Although tidal interactions seemed unlikely when we began this work,  we must reconsider them after eliminating the other possibilities."  

Looking at the inverted L image, you can clearly see the jets at 2:00 and 4:00, and you can see the jet at 10:00 fairly well.  The additional jet is at 8:00, but there is just the faintest whisper of it present in this data.  If I were better able to bring them out, you would see that the four jets form an X across the galaxy.  The dog leg in the jet at 2:00 is very unusal, but well documented in other sources.

As I say, it was my goal to bring those out as much as possible, while minimizing the negative impact on the rest of the image. While I probably would have made different processing choices if they were not present, I am still happy with the overall image.

Thanks again to Kevin for sharing this data with me.

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Title: Inverted L showing 3 of the 4 jets

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Optical Jets of NGC1097, Tim Hutchison

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