Meet galaxy NGC 5128, also known as Centaurus A.

Anyone notice something weird going on here?

If you’ve been following my recent posts on galaxies, you might notice that this does not look like a typical galaxy. It has a clear dust band, so it can’t be an elliptical; elliptical galaxies have no obvious dust or gas. But it doesn’t look much like a spiral, either: it has a bright, spherical cloud of stars you’d more expect from an elliptical!

And it’s definitely not an irregular galaxy. It definitely has a disk shape, and irregulars are not disk galaxies.

So what the heck is going on with this galaxy?

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