Radio Galaxy Zoo Talk

  • jo-luc by jo-luc

    seems to be a very powerful or nearby source?

    Posted

  • JeanTate by JeanTate in response to jo-luc's comment.

    The radio source seems rather weak (only two contour lines), but the IR (and optical) source very big and bright:

    enter image description here

    It's NGC 3877, an inclined spiral galaxy at a distance of ~16Mpc (megaparsecs, or about 52 million light years), which is almost inside the house, cosmologically-speaking. 😮

    So, not a very powerful source; rather an extremely nearby one. So nearby in fact that the source of radio emission may be from star clusters in the nucleus rather than an AGN (the SDSS spectrum shows narrow emission lines typical of star-formation rather than the accretion disk of an AGN). In other words, the supermassive black hole at the center of the nucleus is surrounded by such a hard vacuum that nothing is happening. Just like at the center of our own galaxy, the Milky Way. 😃

    Happy hunting! 😃

    Posted