Galaxy Zoo Talk

Appears to be a binary star system.

  • OwensAndrew by OwensAndrew

    Am I correct in this assessment?

    Posted

  • ElisabethB by ElisabethB moderator

    Hi OwensAndrew

    At first I thought stars as well, but looking at the optical image I'm not so sure. But it still could be a nice chance alignment. Anyway, I contacted one of the scientists and asked her to take a look.

    Posted

  • feralmoonchild by feralmoonchild

    I was thinking planetary nebula but with very strong lobes instead of the more circular arrangement. Other possibilities occur to me as well, but it would take an astronomer with access to more data to tell us what we're really looking at.

    Posted

  • feralmoonchild by feralmoonchild

    If were really a galaxy, then we might be seeing lensing, or core jet activity, but likely more mundane explanations exist.

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  • ElisabethB by ElisabethB moderator

    We are looking into it ! Keep an eye on this thread ! 😄

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  • vrooje by vrooje admin, scientist

    Hi all,

    To decide whether these are stars or (lensed or binary) quasars we can use the SDSS magnitudes to check where they fall on "color-color" plots, that is, plots of one color versus another. Stars will generally fall on a particular locus within these diagrams, whereas quasars fall outside it. (There's more details in e.g. Richards et al. or Ivezic et al. if anyone wants to take a look.)

    Using these and the data from SDSS Explore for these objects (Note: @Capella05 has posted some great how-to points on how to get more info about SDSS sources here), they each fall right on the stellar locus, so unless something went wrong with the SDSS measurements this is likely just a chance alignment of two hot (blue-white) stars and a redder star or galaxy between them. Note it doesn't mean they're actually that close together physically, just that they're all nearly lined up on the image.

    Shame it's probably not a lens, as that would have been a cool discovery! 😃

    -Brooke

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  • ElisabethB by ElisabethB moderator

    Thanks, Brooke !

    What a shame it is 'just' stars ! 😄

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  • mcgalaxy by mcgalaxy in response to ElisabethB's comment.

    It is still very pretty!

    Posted