NGC 3079 & Twin Quasar (Robert Gillette)

Celestial hemisphere: Northern · Constellation: Ursa Major (UMa) · Contains: NGC 3073 · NGC 3079

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NGC 3079 & Twin Quasar

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NGC 3079 & Twin Quasar

Not a perfect image, but this captures a tiny but fascinating object of historic importance – the Twin Quasar, QSO 0957+561A&B. It’s the faint, nearly indistinguishable pair to the lower right of galaxy NGC 3097.

There’s only one quasar here but two points of light. Discovered in 1979 by Dennis Walsh and colleagues at Kitt Peak, the Twin Quasar was the first confirmation of gravitational lensing found after Einstein proclaimed the possibility in 1936, based on his General Theory of Relativity. “Of course,” he said in a paper at the time, “there is no hope of observing this phenomenon directly.”

A single quasar at a distance of 8.7 billion light-years is lensed by a giant elliptical galaxy in our line of sight (but not visible here.) The two images, real and chimerical, at mag 16.7 and 16.5, are 6 arc-seconds and 14 light-months apart.

At this distance, light that formed this image was half-way to earth when the earth was forming.

B is an inverted version; C provides labels drawn from Simbad (which identifies the Twin as QSO 0957+560A&B) and pinpoints two other QSOs in the image – QSO b0958+559 and QSO b0957+5549 along with galaxies NGC 3073 and MCG 09-17-009.

Captured 17 March 2010, just posted now. Credit to Wikipedia, and thanks and to my friend Ralph Pass for enabling labeling of images from the Simbad database.

Final
Original
B
C

B

Description: Inverted Version

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C

Description: Labeled Version

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Status	Advanced success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	3406924
PixInsight job	C17G7N9ANTN2ZV96SFWGR1L8Y9SHW80F
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	n/a

RA (center)	10h01m34s.62
RA (top/left)	10h02m14s.83
RA (top/right)	10h03m18s.50
RA (bottom/right)	10h00m53s.70
RA (bottom/left)	09h59m52s.60

Dec (center)	+55°43′58″.1
Dec (top/left)	+55°27′09″.5
Dec (top/right)	+55°54′09″.4
Dec (bottom/right)	+56°00′46″.1
Dec (bottom/left)	+55°33′41″.3

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NGC 3079 & Twin Quasar

NGC 3079 & Twin Quasar

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NGC 3079 & Twin Quasar

NGC 3079 & Twin Quasar

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