Messier 60

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Galaxy
Messier 60
{{{Card text}}}
Arp116 Hubble.jpg
Hubble image of Messier 60; top right: NGC 4647
AladinLite
Constellation Virgin
Position
equinoxJ2000.0 , epoch : J2000.0
Right ascension 12 h 43 m 40.0 s
declination + 11 ° 33 ′ 10 ″
Appearance
Morphological type E2  
Brightness  (visual) 8.8 likes
Brightness  (B-band) 9.8 likes
Angular expansion 7.6 ′ × 6.2 ′
Position angle 105 °
Surface brightness 13.1 mag / arcmin²
Physical data
Affiliation Virgo Galaxy
Cluster , LGG 292  
Redshift +0.003726 ± 0.000020  
Radial velocity (+1117 ± 6) km / s  
Stroke distance
v rad  / H 0
(47 ± 3)  ·  10 6  ly
(14.5 ± 1)  Mpc 
diameter 120,000 ly
history
discovery Johann Gottfried Koehler
Discovery date April 11, 1779
Catalog names
M  60 • NGC  4649 • UGC  7898 • PGC  42831 • CGCG  071-016 • MCG  + 02-33-002 • 2MASX  J12434000 + 1133093 • Arp  116 (together with NGC 4647)  • VV  206a • GC  3182 • h  1408 • Holm 448A • KPG 353B

Messier 60 (also known as NGC 4649 ) is an 8.8  mag bright elliptical galaxy in the constellation Virgo .

M 60 was discovered together with the neighboring galaxies M 58 and M 59 during the observation of the comet in 1779. Johann Gottfried Köhler discovered the galaxy on April 11th, Barnaba Oriani discovered it a day later and Charles Messier finally discovered it independently four days later. The galaxy is in the Virgo galaxy cluster, next to the most massive galaxy M 87 and the brightest galaxy M 49, the third giant elliptical galaxy and main galaxy of the subgroup Virgo cluster C. This group forms the easternmost part of the galaxy cluster and M 60 itself is the easternmost object of the Virgo -Haufens in the Messier catalog.

M60 is about 120,000 light years in diameter and has a mass of about 1 trillion solar masses . In the Hubble sequence , the galaxy is of type E2, so it is slightly flattened. M 60 has a relatively densely populated halo with around 5,000 globular clusters . An interesting detail even in the small telescope is the nearby companion NGC 4647 , a spiral galaxy . It was assumed that both galaxies interact gravitationally with each other, and summarized them under Arp 116 ; However, recent studies do not confirm this. Halton Arp organized his catalog of unusual galaxies into groups according to purely morphological criteria. This galaxy belongs to the class of elliptical galaxies close to spiral galaxies and disturbing them (Arp catalog) .

On January 28, 2004, a type Ia ( SN 2004W ) supernova with a brightness greater than 18.8 mag was discovered in M ​​60 by the Lick Observatory Supernova Search (LOSS).

At the beginning of 2008, a team of American and Italian researchers succeeded in determining the mass of the black hole in the center of the galaxy. To do this, they measured the temperature of the hot gas in the center of M 60 with the help of the Chandra X-ray satellite , from which the mass of the black hole can be derived indirectly (the hotter the gas, the heavier the black hole). The black hole has a mass of 3.4 billion solar masses, which is more than a thousand times that of the black hole in the center of our Milky Way.

The companion galaxy M60-UCD1, an ultra-compact dwarf galaxy 22,000 light years away from M60 , was discovered in 2014 to house a supermassive black hole. Most of the stars and outer dark matter were probably torn away from it in a collision with M60 ten billion years ago.

Web links

Commons : Messier 60  - collection of images, videos and audio files

literature

  • Jeff Kanipe and Dennis Webb: The Arp Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies - A Chronicle and Observer's Guide " , Richmond 2006, ISBN 978-0-943396-76-7

Individual evidence

  1. a b c d NASA / IPAC EXTRAGALACTIC DATABASE
  2. a b c d e SEDS : NGC 4649
  3. Seligman
  4. ^ A. Franco-Balderas, HM Hernández-Toledo, D. Dultzin-Hacyan, M. Rosado: BVRI Surface Photometry of Mixed Morphology Pairs of Galaxies. III. The Third Data Set. 2005, bibcode : 2005RMxAA..41..483F .
  5. R. de Grijs, ARI Robertson: Arp 116: interacting system or chance alignment? 2006, bibcode : 2006A & A ... 460..493D .
  6. SEDS: Supernova 2004W in M60. ( Memento from July 18, 2012 in the web archive archive.today ).
  7. ScienceTicker Astro: More mass, more heat.
  8. Harald Zaun: A monster pulsates in the center of a dwarf galaxy. Welt, September 18, 2014.
  9. Anil Seth, Matthias Frank, Nadine Neumayer and others: A supermassive black hole in an ultra-compact dwarf galaxy. In: Nature. Volume 513, 2014, pp. 398-400, abstract.