The galaxy was also spotted by John Herschel and added to the General Catalogue of Nebulae and Clusters as number 3572.

The galaxy exhibits an extended emission line region elongated in a direction close to the radio position angle of 87°±3°.

Chris Simpson et al. analysed images takes from the WFPC2 camera of the Hubble Space Telescope in [O III] λ5007 and Hα and found emission extending eastward for at least 1.8 kpc and in the [O III]/Hα map a well-defined V-shaped structure that they identified as the projection of a tridimensional ionisation cone, which shares the same axis with the radio emission.

[7] The mass of the supermassive black hole has been estimated based on the galaxy stellar velocity dispersion to be 106.4 M⊙.

[11] In 2004, Guainazzi et al. detected in the images from XMM-Newton an ultraluminous X-ray source, named NGC 5643 ULX1, located within 0.8 arcminutes from the nucleus.