Celestial hemisphere:  Northern  ·  Constellation: Boötes (Boo)
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UGC 9511, Gary Imm
UGC 9511, Gary Imm

UGC 9511

Getting plate-solving status, please wait...
UGC 9511, Gary Imm
UGC 9511, Gary Imm

UGC 9511

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Description

This Astrobin Debut Object, also known as I Zw 96, is a quartet of distant yellow galaxies all located 1.2 billion light years away in the constellation of Bootes at a declination of +51 degrees.  As with many of the obscure objects I have been imaging lately, I found nothing to explain what we are looking at here.   

The central galaxy is a large elliptical Seyfert galaxy located 1.2 billion light years away in the constellation of Bootes at a declination of +51 degrees.  It is a magnitude 17 galaxy which spans 40 arc-seconds in our apparent view.  This corresponds to a large diameter of 230,000 light years.

It looks like the large central elliptical (UGC 9511) is expanding by drawing in 3 nearby small galaxies for a merger.  The 3 smaller galaxies are each about 30,000 light years in diameter.  Based on their structure, the top one looks like an elliptical while the other 2 look like spiral.  This is also confirmed by the star streams.  I have found that, when interacting with large ellipticals, small spirals are much more likely to have visible star stream connections than small ellipticals.

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