NGC 4945: Wouldn't Want to Live There!OTA: PW17
Camera: QHY600 (I think)
Observatory: Deep Sky West, Chile
Exposures:
R: 18 x 300 sec
G: 22 x 300
B: 18 x 300
H: 27 x 1200 sec
Total Exposure time used: 13.8 hours
Image Width: 33 arcminutes
One Pixel spans 1E15 km of the target
Processing: PixInsight, Topaz Studio2, Aurora HDR, and custom scripts for image weighting and star replacement
(down-sampled 2x before processing)
NGC 4945 shows all the markings of a galaxy in turmoil. The spiral structure displays its disarray, and the central bulge lies behind a dust shroud, avoiding direct observation in the visible spectrum. Many dark clouds appear tattered; a halo of stars, likely ejected from the disk, surrounds the galaxy. The galaxy is in turmoil. Perhaps caused partly by a close encounter with another galaxy in the Centaurus galactic cluster? But another reason for the churning features is that NGC 4945 is a Seyfert-2 megamaser galaxy (
https://arxiv.org/abs/1608.00258) with a super-sized black hole at its center. Further chaos arises from at least 27 superclusters of young stars bursting into existence, with more than half emitting synchrotron radiation (
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2009.05154.pdf) in addition to their hypersonic winds driving stars from the galactic plane and shredding and exciting the interstellar clouds.
NGC 4945 does not seem like an idyllic harbor for advanced life forms. Nonetheless, I hope you enjoy this rendition of a place more violent than our own earth.
Alex Woronow
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