ASTRO: Arp 186

Suddenly we have a lot of nice posts coming in again to the group.
Things were getting pretty slow here. Keep them coming!

Arp 186 is one of the few highly studied galaxies in Arp's catalog.
Oddly, the majority of his galaxies have received little attention.
This one has been studied extensively at IR and radio frequencies as
well as optical by the Hubble Space Telescope. It is thought to be the
merger of two galaxies that is nearly complete. The tidal tails are
still evident so the merger is recent. The Hubble web page on this one
tells its story so I'll refer you to that link for the details.
http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/arc...8/16/image/bq/

Arp classed it under Galaxies (not classifiable as S or E): Narrow
filaments. It is located in Eridanus and is about 200 million light
years away.

Besides the ordinary full image at 1" per pixel I've included a 2x
enlargement of just the galaxy rotated to closely match the Hubble image
so that west is at the top rather than north as the full image is oriented.

The near edge on like galaxy south of Arp 186 is 2MFGC 03719. I find no
distance estimate for it. There are two blue galaxies to the south west
of Arp 186. The one nearest to Arp 186 is PGC 146387 about 475 million
light-years away, or over twice as far as Arp 186. The other one is
2MASX J04342393-0839138 also at about 475 million light years so those
two are near each other. The gray galaxy above and a bit left of Arp
186 is PGC 1003489.

Somehow I managed to process this long ago but then lost it on the hard
drive. So I'm a bit late posting it. It was taken February 2009 and
processed early last fall! Makes me wonder how many more of these are
lurking on the hard drive.

Arp's image
http://nedwww.ipac.caltech.edu/level...ig_arp186.jpeg

Hubble image: Different link from above with different text.
http://www.spacetelescope.org/images...heic0810ax.jpg

14" LX200R @ F/10, R=4x10' RGB=2x10', STL-11000XM, Paramount ME

Rick

--
Correct domain name is arvig and it is net not com. Prefix is correct.
Third character is a zero rather than a capital "Oh".