AAS 198th Meeting, June 2001
Session 57. Cosmological Impact of Galactic Winds
Display, Wednesday, June 6, 2001, 10:00am-7:00pm, Exhibit Hall

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[57.06] Very Extended Ionized Gas in NGC 1068

P. L. Shopbell (Caltech), J. Bland-Hawthorn (AAO), S. Veilleux (UMD)

We present deep narrowband H-alpha, H-beta, and [OIII] imagery of the nearby Seyfert galaxy NGC 1068, taken with the Taurus Tunable Filter (TTF) on the AAT. This instrument uses a Fabry-Perot etalon at very low orders of interference, which enables essentially monochromatic imaging at arbitrary wavelengths. Our TTF images reveal an extensive network of ionized filaments, extending more than 2.5' (> 10 kpc) from the active nucleus of the galaxy. This is far beyond the region of the well-known ionization cones. Although confined primarily along the direction of the radio jets, the filament morphology is complex and distributed over a wide range of position angle. In this paper, we present these images and propose a number of arguments regarding the physical nature and ionization mechanism for these extended filaments.


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