Galaxies spiralling out of control
Today’s OOTW features Alice’s OOTD, posted on the 29th of July.
AHZ40004wr from Hubble Zoo
This is AHZ40004wr, a galaxy residing in the constellation Taurus around 3 billion light years away. It’s a wonderful spiral galaxy, and following its spiral arms is a large dust lane, a place full of young stars and stars that are only just being formed.
AHZ40004wr by Swengineer
Zooite Swengineer gave us a wider view of AHZ40004wr and the surrounding galaxies by working with the FITS images and revealed the mess of galaxies above. The main spiral galaxy in the background is 2MASS J03324999-2734330, an X-ray source according to SIMBAD, and it is also around 3 billion light years away.
You can view more images of these galaxies here and here, and to work with the FITS files I recommend DS9 or Aladin, which I used to find the other galaxies details.
And to highlight a request from Alice’s OOTD, Alice would very much like to know if anyone could write any FITS and image editing tutorials on the galaxy zoo forum.
3 responses to “Galaxies spiralling out of control”
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- - July 31, 2010
Galaxy Zoo 
Wow, this is funny.
I am just preparing some posts about HST surveys and the lower image is one of my favourite objects in GEMS. The 4 galaxies above are actually 2 galaxy mergers behind each other. If you play around with contrast/brightness (and you know the distances of the individual galaxies) it becomes clear that the two red galaxies are merging, but the 2 blue ones in the foreground are as well.
I will pick this up when I write about GEMS. 😉
An amazing sight. Someone needs to take a closer look