Merger? Disturbed?

• by uwfshane

  I struggled with this one. It's awfully blurry, but appears there might be some interaction here. Any thoughts?

  Posted October 21, 2015 12:56 PM

• by JeanTate in response to uwfshane's comment.

  This is an Illustris sim, and in these dust is simulated as a 'screen'. That's unlike the real universe, where it often clumps and forms 'dust lanes'. Also, the spectacular, colored knots you often see in a merger involving two spirals (they're regions of intense star-formation) are very much muted in the Illustris sims (lots of interesting reasons why).

  So even the most splendid-looking merger, in Illustris, is going to look rather washed-out and dull. Even more so if one the merging galaxies is an ETG (early-type galaxy; basically, has little cold gas left).

  Finally, in GZ Illustris, all galaxies are viewed from the same (simulated) distance, a redshift of 0.05. While there may be chance alignments of simulated galaxies in the images we get to view, I think they'll be pretty rare.

  tl;dr ... yes, it almost certainly signifies some sort of interaction.

  Happy hunting! 😃

  Posted October 21, 2015 1:09 PM

• by uwfshane in response to JeanTate's comment.

  Thanks, I didn't think to look to see if it was an Illustris sim! I'll start keeping a better eye out on the source section of the classify screen. Also looked up the Illustris Project for some additional perspective: http://www.illustris-project.org/about/#public-two

  Posted October 21, 2015 2:35 PM