Image: Phot-27e-07

Description: K-band image obtained with NACO and the LGS of the active galaxy NGC 4945. The colour-code corresponds to intensity. Lurking in the very heart of this spiral galaxy is a supermassive black hole that is obscured at optical and infrared wavelengths, but which is one of the brightest in the local universe when observed in hard X-rays. The new LGS observations with NACO resolved the continuum in the central thousand light-years into a multitude of individual stars. The exquisite detail meant that it was possible to measure the magnitudes of the brightest of these stars. It suggests that they are red supergiant stars, which would have been born about 10 million years ago. Closer to the nucleus, the stars group into clusters, and become ever more closely packed. The huge luminosity of the central few clusters suggests that there are 10 to 100 such supergiant stars in each of these, packed into regions just a few parsecs across. ID: phot-27e-07 Press Release: ESO 27/07 [dead link] Long Caption: http://www.eso.org/public/outreach/press-rel/pr-2007/phot-27-07.html [dead link] Object: NGC 4945 Telescope: UT4/Yepun Instrument: SINFONI, NACO Size: 2358x2349 Credit: ESO
Title: Phot-27e-07
Credit: http://www.eso.org/gallery/v/ESOPIA/Galaxies/phot-27e-07.jpg.html
Author: ESO: observations by Susana Randall, Claudio Melo, Swetlana Hubrig; day astronomer Dominique Naef; Henri Boffin (ESO) processed the data and made the colour-composite, and Haennes Heyer (ESO) made the final adjustments.
Permission: This photograph was produced by European Southern Observatory (ESO). Their website states: "All ESO still and motion pictures, with the exception of the ESO Logo, are released under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, unless the credit byline indicates otherwise." To the uploader: You must provide a link (URL) to the original file and the authorship information if available. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. You are free: to share – to copy, distribute and transmit the work to remix – to adapt the work Under the following conditions: attribution – You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0 CC BY 4.0 Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 truetrue
Usage Terms: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0
License: CC BY 4.0
License Link: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Attribution Required?: Yes