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Z.G. Levay, H.E. Bond, C.A. Christian, L.M. Frattare, F. Hamilton, M. Mutchler, K.S. Noll, P. Royle (STScI), P.M. Knezek (WIYN)
The Hubble Heritage Project presents an image of the prototypical barred spiral galaxy NGC 1300. This image is constructed from exposures in four filters made at two adjacent pointings by the Advanced Camera for Surveys on the Hubble Space Telescope. Fine detail in the arms, disk, bar, bulge and completely across the nucleus are clearly apparent. Numerous more distant galaxies may be seen beyond NGC 1300, even through the densest regions of the disk and bulge. Clusters of blue supergiant stars and HII regions are well resolved in the spiral arms, and dust lanes trace out structure in the disk and bar, highlighting asymmetry between the two halves of the galaxy.
NGC 1300, like many barred spiral galaxies, has a small, well defined, "grand design" spiral disk visible around the nucleus. Only galaxies with large-scale bars appear to have these "grand design" inner spiral disks. Models indicate that gas in a bar can be funneled towards the center of the galaxy, where it can then spiral into the center through the "grand design" spiral disk, and potentially fuel a central black hole. NGC 1300 does not have an active nucleus, however, indicating either that there is no black hole present, or that the black hole is currently in a quiescent state.
The data, obtained in B, V, I and H-alpha, are available to the science community and the public through the HST archive. Since its inception in 1998, the Heritage Project has produced more than 77 images of dazzling celestial objects released on the first Thursday of every month. The Heritage website can be found at: http://heritage.stsci.edu.
If you would like more information about this abstract, please follow the link to http://heritage.stsci.edu/. This link was provided by the author. When you follow it, you will leave the Web site for this meeting; to return, you should use the Back comand on your browser.
The author(s) of this abstract have provided an email address for comments about the abstract: levay@stsci.edu
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Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, 36 5
© 2004. The American Astronomical Society.