Two rings of newborn stars, drawn around an ancient bar by the slow, steady pull of its gravity
NGC 1350 is a barred spiral galaxy in the southern constellation Fornax, classified (R’)SB(r)ab. It is one of the clearest examples in the sky of a doubly ringed galaxy, its tightly wound arms closing into an inner ring and its faint outer arms drawing a second, wider pseudo-ring around the whole system
It lies about 61 million light-years away and spans 6.1 by 3.3 arcminutes on the sky, a true diameter of roughly 109,000 light-years, larger than our own Milky Way. At blue magnitude 11.3 it is within reach of modest telescopes, yet its full structure only emerges with long exposures
At the center a warm golden bulge and a short bar of old stars are wrapped by the inner ring, where threads of dark dust spiral inward and pink knots of glowing hydrogen mark nurseries of newborn stars. Beyond it lies a smooth, darker zone of older stars, and then the outer ring, a pale blue band of young stars so thin in places that more distant galaxies show through it. Seen at this tilt, the two rings give NGC 1350 the look of an enormous eye
NGC 1350 sits on the outskirts of the Fornax Cluster, at a distance matching that of the cluster itself. Rings like these are shaped by the bar. As it rotates, its gravity herds gas into resonant orbits, where it piles up and forms new stars. The inner ring, the gap and the outer ring each trace one of these resonances, a large-scale structure set by gravity and preserved over billions of years
The surrounding field is crowded with far more distant galaxies, small spirals and edge-on disks scattered across the background, showing that the dark between the stars of our own galaxy is full of other worlds
Imaged in LRGB and Hα on the Planewave CDK 1000, Camera Moravian C5-100, at Observatorio El Sauce, Chile
Image Acquisition and Processing: Mike Selby