Lens Arc?
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by
ZooBill
I looked at this photo on the sky server and zoomed in. The bar/ring that's merging seems to have a blue arc at it's top left. A lens arc?? By the way, on the sky server, the faint edge of an image in the upper right corner is a nice ring galaxy, but to the lower left, just out of the photo is an extremely massive spiral galaxy. Worth taking a look at.
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by
ZooBill
Info for the spiral galaxy
Object ID 1237648675068379390
Right Ascension242.49454463
Declination 0.70920865Posted
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by
zutopian
Posted
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by
drphilmarshall
scientist
This is a very good lens candidate, great spot! There's clearly a lot of mass there, and the blue arc is in a lensed-like position with the right sort of curvature and orientation (ie wrapped around the massive galaxies). Do you see the other arc next to the third brightest red galaxy, in the bottom right? That could be a background galaxy too. The only doubt I have about this system is its context: the red galaxies are quite disturbed, presumably a result of their merging activity. And merging usually brings star formation - so the blue features could easily by star forming regions in the otherwise red galaxies. We'd need to take a spectrum to distingusih these possibilities. Alternatively, we could check the lens hypothesis by modelling it: if the lens model predicts counter-images that are not there, that would be evidence against the lens hypothesis...
Posted
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by
ZooBill
Did anyone get a chance to go on the sky server and look at the massive spiral galaxy to the left of this image using the info I have on it above? Or just look at this image, AGZ00015y6, on the sky server and it will be in the image frame...South of this image. I'd like to know more about it. It must be an already well known galaxy. Thanks for any info you can give me.
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Nice find
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