ASTRO: Arp 263 with SN 2012a

SN2012a was discovered by amateur astronomers on January 7th. It was
the first supernova of the year. It is a type II super nova meaning it
is a single massive star that lived fast and died in a blaze of glory we
are just now seeing millions of years later. The redshift distance to
the galaxy is 50 million light-years but most think it closer though, to
be consistent, I used the 50 million light-year figure on the annotated
image. Most current estimates are more like 25 to 30 million
light-years. The one Tully-Fisher measurement at NED says 26 million
light-years. In any case it is a rather small galaxy, likely the result
of a merger of two even smaller galaxies. NED classes it as IB(s)M pec.
It has two tidal tails. A straight one on the west side going south
southeast that is full of knots of star formation. The other tail is a
smooth curving one also starting south but curving around the east side
of the galaxy and ending up going north with the SN at its base. These
likely show the paths of the colliding galaxies. Assuming 26 million
light-years the galaxy is about 35,000 light years across as seen from
our perspective.

Colliding galaxies as is likely the case here, create a large number of
massive new stars which will quickly go super nova after using up their
huge fuel supply in only a few tens of million of years. So seeing a SN
in one is not all that unexpected. It does make the fifth Arp galaxy
I've imaged with a super nova going off in it. Arp often didn't realize
it but many of his galaxies were highly disturbed and thus creating
massive, short lived stars destined to go out with a very big bang. In
fact SN hunters target many of them for this reason. A good paper on
this galaxy is at:
http://articles.adsabs.harvard.edu/f...ASP..102...41K

To me the galaxy looks a lot like Minnesota's state bird, the common
loon. For this reason I'm presenting it south at the top east to the
right. The left tail being a pointed tail on the loon which doesn't
have such a tail and the other forming its head with a red star for the
eye. The loon does have a red eye so this is correct. It also has a
white neck band right where two bright star forming regions and the SN
make a bright area.

There's a lot of confusion about the SN on the net. Many at first
thought the bright star to its west was the SN. That is just a star in
our own galaxy. When discovered, it was said to be magnitude 14.6
brightening to 14.4 the following day and 13.9 a few days later.
Unfortunately it has been cloudy here until a sort of opening on the
21st. It closed before I could get but 4 luminance shots. I got the
needed color on the 28th but clouds moved in on the blue frames. This
cost blue in the fainter areas of the galaxy as it just didn't get
through the clouds. Other problems with the mount driver conflicting
with something in my computer has made getting further color data
impossible so I'm going with this. My quick estimate shows the star at
13.6 magnitude in my image. If you look at early images when it was
fainter such as the discovery image at:
http://www.skyandtelescope.com/commu...136977918.html
the SN appears far brighter than the two star forming regions nearby.
Yet it appears about the same brightness in my image. This is due to my
stretching the image to bring out the galaxy. This greatly reduced the
contrast between the two. Measuring the actual data shows the SN to be
about 5 times brighter than the star clouds. Many SN hunters use red
sensitive cameras as well which would also increase the difference
between the white of the SN and blue of the star clouds.

There are several galaxy clusters in the image. The one to the upper
right is WHL J102522.5+170225 with 17 galaxies with no diameter given.
Why the anchor galaxies distance is so different from the cluster's I
don't know. The cluster below the galaxy is GMBCG J156.22001+17.21934
with 12 galaxies in an undefined area. At least its distance does match
that of its anchor galaxy. A third cluster is further east and south of
the galaxy, GMBCG J156.54392+17.04437 at 3.6 billion light-years. It
contains only 8 galaxies but its distance is the same as that of the
anchor galaxy. Southwest of the galaxy is yet another cluster; GMBCG
J156.13244+16.99977 at 3.7 billion light-years. It's distance matches
that of the anchor galaxy as well. It contains 10 galaxies in an
unknown area. Several other clusters are noted in the image at NED but
seeing nothing at those positions I didn't include them in the annotated
image.

CGCG 094-040 is a rather obvious galaxy in the image but without any
redshift data. I included it with a question mark for the distance.
Likely it too is at the 0.61-0.62 billion light-year distance of the
other CGCG galaxies in the image.

What's missing are any galaxies at the distance of Arp 263. It does
seem rather alone in the universe yet apparently did merge with a companion.

14" LX200R @ f/10, L=4x10 RGB=2x10, STL-11000XM, Paramount ME

Rick


--
Prefix is correct. Domain is arvig dot net

Rick,

at first look I wondered why I didn't have this galaxy on my list, but now I
found it under it's NGC designation.
Quite an attractive galaxy if one can get as deep as yourself (it is marked
as "weak" in my list).

Stefan

"Rick Johnson" schrieb im Newsbeitrag
. com...
SN2012a was discovered by amateur astronomers on January 7th. It was
the first supernova of the year. It is a type II super nova meaning it
is a single massive star that lived fast and died in a blaze of glory we
are just now seeing millions of years later. The redshift distance to
the galaxy is 50 million light-years but most think it closer though, to
be consistent, I used the 50 million light-year figure on the annotated
image. Most current estimates are more like 25 to 30 million
light-years. The one Tully-Fisher measurement at NED says 26 million
light-years. In any case it is a rather small galaxy, likely the result
of a merger of two even smaller galaxies. NED classes it as IB(s)M pec.
It has two tidal tails. A straight one on the west side going south
southeast that is full of knots of star formation. The other tail is a
smooth curving one also starting south but curving around the east side
of the galaxy and ending up going north with the SN at its base. These
likely show the paths of the colliding galaxies. Assuming 26 million
light-years the galaxy is about 35,000 light years across as seen from
our perspective.

Colliding galaxies as is likely the case here, create a large number of
massive new stars which will quickly go super nova after using up their
huge fuel supply in only a few tens of million of years. So seeing a SN
in one is not all that unexpected. It does make the fifth Arp galaxy
I've imaged with a super nova going off in it. Arp often didn't realize
it but many of his galaxies were highly disturbed and thus creating
massive, short lived stars destined to go out with a very big bang. In
fact SN hunters target many of them for this reason. A good paper on
this galaxy is at:
http://articles.adsabs.harvard.edu/f...ASP..102...41K

To me the galaxy looks a lot like Minnesota's state bird, the common
loon. For this reason I'm presenting it south at the top east to the
right. The left tail being a pointed tail on the loon which doesn't
have such a tail and the other forming its head with a red star for the
eye. The loon does have a red eye so this is correct. It also has a
white neck band right where two bright star forming regions and the SN
make a bright area.

There's a lot of confusion about the SN on the net. Many at first
thought the bright star to its west was the SN. That is just a star in
our own galaxy. When discovered, it was said to be magnitude 14.6
brightening to 14.4 the following day and 13.9 a few days later.
Unfortunately it has been cloudy here until a sort of opening on the
21st. It closed before I could get but 4 luminance shots. I got the
needed color on the 28th but clouds moved in on the blue frames. This
cost blue in the fainter areas of the galaxy as it just didn't get
through the clouds. Other problems with the mount driver conflicting
with something in my computer has made getting further color data
impossible so I'm going with this. My quick estimate shows the star at
13.6 magnitude in my image. If you look at early images when it was
fainter such as the discovery image at:
http://www.skyandtelescope.com/commu...136977918.html
the SN appears far brighter than the two star forming regions nearby.
Yet it appears about the same brightness in my image. This is due to my
stretching the image to bring out the galaxy. This greatly reduced the
contrast between the two. Measuring the actual data shows the SN to be
about 5 times brighter than the star clouds. Many SN hunters use red
sensitive cameras as well which would also increase the difference
between the white of the SN and blue of the star clouds.

There are several galaxy clusters in the image. The one to the upper
right is WHL J102522.5+170225 with 17 galaxies with no diameter given.
Why the anchor galaxies distance is so different from the cluster's I
don't know. The cluster below the galaxy is GMBCG J156.22001+17.21934
with 12 galaxies in an undefined area. At least its distance does match
that of its anchor galaxy. A third cluster is further east and south of
the galaxy, GMBCG J156.54392+17.04437 at 3.6 billion light-years. It
contains only 8 galaxies but its distance is the same as that of the
anchor galaxy. Southwest of the galaxy is yet another cluster; GMBCG
J156.13244+16.99977 at 3.7 billion light-years. It's distance matches
that of the anchor galaxy as well. It contains 10 galaxies in an
unknown area. Several other clusters are noted in the image at NED but
seeing nothing at those positions I didn't include them in the annotated
image.

CGCG 094-040 is a rather obvious galaxy in the image but without any
redshift data. I included it with a question mark for the distance.
Likely it too is at the 0.61-0.62 billion light-year distance of the
other CGCG galaxies in the image.

What's missing are any galaxies at the distance of Arp 263. It does
seem rather alone in the universe yet apparently did merge with a
companion.

14" LX200R @ f/10, L=4x10 RGB=2x10, STL-11000XM, Paramount ME

Rick


--
Prefix is correct. Domain is arvig dot net