Where In The Universe #82

Here’s this week’s image for the Where In The Universe Challenge, to test your visual knowledge of the cosmos. You know what to do: take a look at this image and see if you can determine where in the universe this image is from; give yourself extra points if you can name the instrument responsible for the image. Weโ€™ll provide the image today, but wonโ€™t reveal the answer until tomorrow. This gives you a chance to mull over the image and provide your answer/guess in the comment section. Please, no links or extensive explanations of what you think this is โ€” give everyone the chance to guess.

UPDATE: The answer is now posted below.

This is Centaurus A as seen in radio wavelengths (408 MHz, to be exact.) (Close, DrFlimmer, but not quite…) This image comes from the Chromoscope, the new online tool that allows you to look at the Universe in whatever wavelength you desire. Stuart Lowe, the lead developer of Chromoscope, showed me this particular image at the dotAstronomy conference last week (and thanks to Scibuff for not giving away the answer!)

The image comes from the all-sky continuum survey done at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy.

Check back next week for another WITU Challenge!

16 Replies to “Where In The Universe #82”

  1. This is a hard one. Since the Hubble deep field was released I am going to guess this is some digitally enhanced section showing a very distant and young galaxy. this object has a spiral-like shape and if it is large it looks very distant. I tried to see if I could find this, but no cigar so far.

    LC

  2. this is a great image … I’m not gonna give it away as it was shown at dot astronomy last week :D. I’m glad Nancy remembered it.

  3. If I had money to put on this, I’d put it on some sort of black hole, complete with central disc of infalling matter and polar jets. Probably shot in X-rays.

    But that’s it.

  4. My first thought was a very fuzzy image of Centaurus A, maybe in X-rays.
    I guess, I will stay with that!

  5. oh! it’s maybe center object of ‘Hubble Ultra Deep Field Infrared WFC3/IR’, by HST in December 8, 2009.

  6. Thanks, Nancy, for the flowers, but I wasn’t the first one guessing CenA. SeanL beat me to it.
    I just wanted to note that ๐Ÿ˜‰

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