This
Astrobin Debut Object is a spiral ring galaxy located 85 million light years away in the constellation of Cetus at a declination of -7 degrees. It is a magnitude 11.6 galaxy which spans 3 arc-minutes in our apparent view. This corresponds to a diameter of 75,000 light years.
From our view perspective, the disk is inclined about 20 degrees from edge-on. This view gives us a nice look at the bright core, the dark dust lanes, the blue star-forming regions, and my favorite part, the continuous, almost perfectly shaped closed outer ring. Although the white portions of the middle region of the disk indicate the start of a grand design spiral arm structure, that structure stops abruptly once it hits the blue outer ring.
My collection of galaxies with closed outer rings is
here.
This galaxy is a Seyfert galaxy. Seyfert galaxies comprise about 10% of all galaxies. These galaxies have very luminous cores and are believed to supermassive black holes at their centers.
These galaxy types are named after Dr. Carl Seyfert, who first identified these galaxies in the 1940s. Like many astronomers, Dr. Seyfert was a man of many talents. He was a popular local weather forecaster on television. Unfortunately, he died early, in 1960 at the age of 49, before the discovery of quasars in 1963 which eventually showed the significance of the galaxies which now bear his name. He died one night in a motor vehicle accident, after one of his television forecasts, driving on his way to his observatory. While driving at about 5 mph through an intersection at 10:30 p.m., his car was hit broadside by another vehicle traveling 35 mph. He was thrown from his car and pinned under one of the wheels.
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