Kelly Lepo
Next in our 19 days of #PHANGS galaxies series is the barred spiral galaxy NGC 3627, as seen by #Hubble and #JWST.
NGC 3627, also known as M66, is about 37 million light-years (11.3 Mpc) away.
It was discovered by Charles Messier on 1 March 1780, object 66 in his catalog of “fuzzy things in the night sky that are not comets”. He described it as "very long and very faint."
📷 https://webbtelescope.org/contents/media/images/2024/105/01HMA6P3V363GW0EA0347CR6HV
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Kelly Lepo
This image of NGC 3627 from the Chandra X-ray Observatory shows the hottest gas in the galaxy as a diffuse blue glow, found in the galaxy’s core, bar, and innermost spiral arm. The bright X-ray source at the center is likely powered by material falling onto a supermassive black hole.
The other bright points are either X-ray binaries (black holes or neutron stars pulling gas off of a normal star companion) or supermassive black holes in background galaxies.
Kelly Lepo
This glittering image of NGC 3627 was taken with the Multi-Unit Spectroscopic Explorer (MUSE) on ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile.
The image highlights the galaxy's warm gas, with hydrogen (red), oxygen (blue), and sulfur (orange). It was also taken as part of the PHANGS survey.
Kelly Lepo
Moving to slightly longer wavelengths, this is an infrared image of NGC 3627 from the Spitzer Infrared Nearby Galaxy Survey (SINGS).
We see a stark contrast between the blue core and bar with a concentration of blue older stars, and the pink bar ends and spiral arms that show dust heated by actively forming stars.
📷 https://www.spitzer.caltech.edu/image/sig05-016-ngc-3627-m66
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Kelly Lepo
This image of NGC 3627, taken with ALMA, shows the location of cold clouds of molecular gas. It’s in these cold, dusty clouds that new stars form.
Like the Hubble and JWST images, this was taken as part of the PHANGS program, which makes high-resolution observations of galaxies with telescopes operating at many different wavelengths of light. Their goal is to understand how the small-scale details of how stars form influence the large-scale structures of galaxies.
Kelly Lepo
NGC 3628, the galaxy in the upper left, likely had an encounter with NGC 3627 (M66) a few hundred million years ago, creating a dramatic tail-like plume.
Gravitational interactions between the three galaxies in the Leo triplet may also be responsible for NGC 3627’s distorted shape and prominent spiral arms.
📷 Fig. 1 from:
https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2022A%26A...658A..25W/abstract
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Kelly Lepo
NGC 3627 is a member of the Leo Triplet. This small group of galaxies consists of the edge-on spiral galaxy NGC3628 at upper left, and the nearly face-on spirals NGC 3627 (M66) at lower left and NGC 3623 (M65) at lower right.
The left image is from Halton Arp's Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies from 1966. The Leo triplet is number 317 in the catalog.
https://ned.ipac.caltech.edu/level5/Arp/Arp80.html
The right image is from the Burrell Schmidt Telescope at Kitt Peak, taken in 1995.
https://noirlab.edu/public/images/noao-m65a66/
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