M51 and Surrounding Field (George Simon)

M51 and Surrounding Field

Like the Whale Galaxy, which I imaged a little more than a week ago, the Whirlpool Galaxy is a target that I have not visited in quite a while (almost 6 years). M51 is such a splashy show-stopper, that when processing the data I acquired to create this image, I was sorely tempted to do a cropped presentation, with M51 and its interacting companion NGC 5195 almost entirely filling the frame. However, inspection of the widefield, processed image led me to resist this temptation. While nowhere nearly as attention-grabbing as the Whirlpool, dozens of small, interesting, more distant galaxies are scattered around the field, providing a sense of depth to the image. So, I decided to crop very little out of the image.

M51 lies about 30 million light years from us. It has been hypothesized that its particular spiral structure has been produced by at least two collisions with NGC 5195. The first of these might have occurred about 500 to 600 million years ago, when NGC 5195 passed through the Whirlpool's disk, coming toward the viewer of the image. The dwarf galaxy then reversed direction and passed back though M51's disk about 50 to 100 million years ago, moving to the position slightly behind the disk that it occupies now.

As would be expected, the interaction between M51 and NGC 5195 has resulted in a high rate of star formation within the Whirlpool. Additionally, M51 has an active galactic nucleus, caused by the infall of material within its supermassive black hole's accretion disk, meriting M51 the designation as a Seyfert galaxy.

M51 and NGC 5195 are members of the small group of galaxies known as the M51 Group. The group also includes M63, NGC 5023 and NGC 5229, none of which appear in this image.

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Title: M51: Close-Up, Cropped Version

Description: This is a cropped, slightly lower-resolution version of the original image.

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M51 and Surrounding Field

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