Celestial hemisphere:  Southern  ·  Constellation: Sculptor (Scl)  ·  Contains:  NGC 300
Getting plate-solving status, please wait...
NGC 300, Jochen Maes
Getting plate-solving status, please wait...
NGC 300, Jochen Maes

Equipment

Loading...

Acquisition details

Loading...

Description

NGC 300 is a spiral galaxy in the Sculptor constellation, around 6 million light years from earth.

Generally speaking, NGC 300 is fairly typical spiral galaxy. There's nothing too overly unusual going in the galaxy as a whole, making it similar to many other galaxies out there. However, it does host a fairly interesting binary system (referred to as NGC 300 X-1). So what is this binary system and why is it interesting?

Just outside of the core region of the galaxy, we see two fairly bright objects orbiting each other. One of them has been confirmed to be a Wolf-Rayet star (without going into specifics, think of it as a very massive an energetic star). The other object is emitting large amounts of X-rays (hence the name) while displaying no stellar characteristics. So bottomline, it's more than likely a black hole that's slowly ripping the massive star apart and pulling in its material. The X-rays that we're seeing are coming from all that material being put into orbit around the black hole and heating up.

Image acquisition details:

18x1800" HA
30x1200" Luminance
18x1200" Red
18x1200" Green
18x1200" Blue

Comments

Sky plot

Sky plot

Histogram

NGC 300, Jochen Maes