This is the third of a series of posts about the weird and wonderful world of southern galaxies as revealed with the ultraviolet eyes of the GALEX satellite.
However, I am sorry, but this time I am going to cheat (!) and post a few Messier object images....they look irresistably strange in UV light.
Here is the view, downloaded from the GalexView virtual telescope, of M98. This is very nice, as it is can be hard to understand what type of galaxy this is due to its relatively edge-on orientation. It seems to me that this view must be far-ultraviolet only, so that what can be seen in this image is the maximum concentrations of massive and luminous stars that are excellent tracers of spiral arms.
In this case, the FUV light clearly shows the spiral arms of this galaxy:
Below, I attach an FUV+NUV view of M63, which is a very peculiar galaxy (unusual outer dust lanes that are not in the principal plane, a very odd shaped outer halo, an outer disk of cold gas that it tilted away from the plane of this galaxy, etc., etc.)
It is interesting to contemplate why knots of star formation should exist so far away from the centre of this galaxy.
(It is surprising in the GALEX imagery how often stars seem to be able to form a long way away from the bright portions of a galaxy). M63 is obviously in a very unusual state of evolution, at present.
Cheers,
madbadgalaxyman
