NGC 4593 (2014)

The central bulge of NGC 4593. The two large arms coming in to form a full circle are part of the tremendous bar structure of the overall galaxy. This is the second time the arms do this. If you look at the whole galaxy, there is another full circle with another set of two arms merging to form it. Just to break the pattern, only a single arm reaches the very center, an active galactic nucleus or AGN which is intensely bright compared to the rest of the galaxy. It also looks very blue because blue here is partially represented by UV light and this, being a Seyfert I galaxy, is very bright in UV and x-rays.

Just FYI on the processing: I cloned data to fill in the spot where it was missing from the two HRC images because of the occulting finger. It wasn’t covering any of the major structures but it was very distracting.

I managed to use data from four different proposals for this. That might be a record for me.

SUBARCSECOND STRUCTURE IN NEARBY AGNS
Near Ultraviolet Imaging of Seyfert Galaxies: Understanding the Starburst-AGN Connection
Host Galaxies of Reverberation-Mapped AGNs
The Black Hole Mass - Bulge Luminosity Relationship for the Nearest Reverberation-Mapped AGNs

Red: hst_05479_1z_wfpc2_f606w_pc_sci
Green: HST_10516_02_ACS_HRC_F550M_sci
Blue: hst_11661_06_wfc3_uvis_f547m_sci + HST_9379_45_ACS_HRC_F330W_sci

North is NOT up. It is 16.6° clockwise from up.

Copyright information:
Hubble data is public domain, but I put a lot of work into combining it into beautiful color images. The minimal credit line should read: NASA / ESA / J. Schmidt

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.