NGC 1365

The Great Barred Spiral Galaxy

Credit: Dark Energy Survey/DOE/FNAL/DECam/CTIO/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA — NGC 1365 imaged with the 570-megapixel Dark Energy Camera (DECam) on the Víctor M. Blanco 4-meter Telescope at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory

NGC 1365, classified with the morphological type SB(s)b, is one of the major galaxies of the Fornax cluster, a group of 58 galaxies located on the border between the homonymous constellation Fornax (the Furnace) and that of Eridanus.

Located at a distance of 18.6 megaparsecs, equal to about 60 million light-years, NGC 1365 is also known as the Great Barred Spiral Galaxy due to its iconic double central bar, from whose ends the two main spiral arms project.

With a diameter of approximately 220,000 light-years, more than double that of the Milky Way, NCG 1365 is one of the largest spiral galaxies in the local Universe. Its total mass is estimated to be around 360 billion solar masses. Far infrared luminosity is calculated to be 54 billion solar luminosities.

NGC 1365 has an active galactic nucleus, powered by a central supermassive black hole of about 2.6 million solar masses which also rotates at a very high speed.

Credit: NASA/ESA — The central region of NGC 1365, imaged by Hubble with the WFC3 instrument

Credit: W. Freedman, the Hubble Space Telescope Key Project team, and NASA/ESA — A partial view of NGC 1365, taken by Hubble in 1996 with the WFPC2 instrument