The Sagittarius Dwarf Irregular Galaxy (SagDIG), Giuseppe Donatiello

The Sagittarius Dwarf Irregular Galaxy (SagDIG)

Acquisition type: Electronically-Assisted Astronomy (EAA, e.g. based on a live video feed)
The Sagittarius Dwarf Irregular Galaxy (SagDIG), Giuseppe Donatiello

The Sagittarius Dwarf Irregular Galaxy (SagDIG)

Acquisition type: Electronically-Assisted Astronomy (EAA, e.g. based on a live video feed)

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Description

The Sagittarius Dwarf Irregular Galaxy

Credit: ESO/VLT, NASA/ESA/HST, Giuseppe Donatiello

The Sagittarius Dwarf Irregular Galaxy (SagDIG orESO594-G004 ) is often confused with the near namesake Sagittarius Dwarf Elliptical Galaxy (SagDEG). What makes the difference, however, is not only the adjective "irregular" because they are two very different objects even though they belong to the same order.

SagDIG, is an autonomous (or isolated) dwarf placed at the boundaries of the Local Group at about 1.9 Mpc, rich in low metallicity stars of an average age. Membership of the Local Group is not ascertained.

SagDEG is instead one of the closest satellite galaxies of the Milky Way, but it would be preferable to say one of the ghosts since this dwarf is now completely destroyed and its remains move along orbits orthogonal to our spiral forming the Sagittarius Stream. A denser cloud of stars is placed in the direction of the galactic center where the globular cluster M54 perhaps represents its nucleus.

I composed these images intrigued by SagDIG after reading a paper with bad images, discovering that very few professional data are available on this object and not even of very high quality.

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The Sagittarius Dwarf Irregular Galaxy (SagDIG), Giuseppe Donatiello