Arp 82 is an interacting pair of galaxies with a strong bridge and a long tail. NGC 2535 is the big galaxy and NGC 2536 is its smaller companion. Dramatic "beads on a string" features are visible as chains of evenly spaced star-formation complexes. The colours of this galaxy indicate that the observed stars are young to intermediate in age, around 2 million to 2 billion years old, much less than the age of the universe (13.7 billion years).

For some reason, the pair didn't make their stars early on as is typical of most galaxies. Instead, they got a second wind later in life – about 2 billion years ago – and started producing waves of new stars as if they were young again.

The pair first burst with new star formation about 2 billion years ago after swinging by each other. A second close passage more recently resulted in yet another batch of star formation.

The puzzle is: why didn’t Arp 82 form many stars earlier, like most galaxies of this mass range? For some reason, it took time to get the stars forming recently, whereas most other galaxies of this mass range formed their stars much earlier (between 4 and 8 billion years ago).

Of course, Halton Arp wasn't aware of this recently discovered data (These new observations are from NASA's Galaxy Evolution Explorer, NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope and the Southeastern Association for Research in Astronomy Observatory at Kitt Peak, Ariz.) - he was chiefly interested in peculiar interacting galaxies. Only later did he develop his ejected quasar theories which were so controversial. In fact there are many quasars around Arp 82 as shown in the Simbad image. I've identified the 1 in my image which is within the image field of view.

There hasn't been much observing for me lately, this image was obtained on 13th December and represents 50 x 120second exposures, acquired and processed in AstroArt3.

My image, showing the position of 1 quasar.