Lying more than 110 million
light-years away from Earth in the constellation of Antlia (The Air Pump) is
the spiral galaxy IC 2560, shown here in an image from NASA/ESA Hubble Space
Telescope. At this distance it is a relatively nearby spiral galaxy, and is
part of the Antlia cluster — a group of over 200 galaxies held together by
gravity. This cluster is unusual; unlike most other galaxy clusters, it appears
to have no dominant galaxy within it.
In this image, it is easy to spot IC
2560's spiral arms and barred structure. This spiral is what astronomers call a
Seyfert-2 galaxy, a kind of spiral galaxy characterized by an extremely bright
nucleus and very strong emission lines from certain elements — hydrogen,
helium, nitrogen, and oxygen. The bright center of the galaxy is thought to be
caused by the ejection of huge amounts of super-hot gas from the region around
a central black hole.
There is a story behind the naming of this quirky
constellation — Antlia was originally named antlia pneumatica by French
astronomer Abbé Nicolas Louis de Lacaille, in honor of the invention of the air
pump in the 17th century.
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