NGC 1365, the Great Barred Spiral Galaxy

NGC 1365, the Great Barred Spiral Galaxy  Barred spiral galaxy NGC 1365 is truly a majestic island universe some 200,000 light-years across and is located 60 million light-years away toward the southern constellation Fornax. This image shows the intense, reddish star forming regions near the ends of central bar and along the spiral arms, with details of the reddish dust lanes cutting across the galaxy’s bright core. At the core lies a supermassive black hole. The spiral arms extend in a wide curve north and south from the ends of the east-west bar and form an almost ring like Z-shaped halo. Different parts of the galaxy take different times to make a full rotation around the core of the galaxy, with the outer parts of the bar completing one circuit in about 350 million years. Astronomers think NGC 1365’s prominent bar plays a crucial role in the galaxy’s evolution drawing gas and dust into a star-forming maelstrom and ultimately feeding material into the central black hole.  NGC 1365 and other galaxies of its type have come to more prominence in recent years with new observations indicating that the Milky Way could also be a barred spiral galaxy. Such galaxies are quite common — two thirds of spiral galaxies are barred according to recent estimates, and studying others can help astronomers understand our own galactic home.