Celestial hemisphere:  Southern  ·  Constellation: Aquarius (Aqr)
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ESO 603-20 and ESO 603-21, Gary Imm
ESO 603-20 and ESO 603-21, Gary Imm

ESO 603-20 and ESO 603-21

Getting plate-solving status, please wait...
ESO 603-20 and ESO 603-21, Gary Imm
ESO 603-20 and ESO 603-21, Gary Imm

ESO 603-20 and ESO 603-21

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Description

These obscure Astrobin Debut Objects are located in the constellation of Aquarius at a declination of -20 degrees.   I could find little information on these 2 galaxies.  Both galaxies have interesting structures and colors.  Although both object disks are slightly warped, the data shows that they are too far apart to be interacting.

ESO 603-20 is the blue superthin galaxy at right, located 160 million light years away.  This galaxy spans 1.7 arc-minutes in our apparent view, which corresponds to a diameter of 80,000 light years.  It has an interesting structure along its length, including a bright core area with no central bulge. 

The big question for this object is whether the bright blue region at the right end of the object is part of the galaxy or a foreground Milky Way star. To me,  the bright region doesn't quite look like the other stars in the image, so my vote would be that it is a star cloud within the galaxy.

ESO 603-21 is the polar ring galaxy at left, located a bit closer at 140 million light years away.  Being classified as at polar ring, this is a multi-spin object with 2 perpendicular axes of rotation.   The smaller yellow brighter main disk is encircled by a perpendicular larger blue ring of dust and gas, ,with brighter blue ansae at each end of the larger ring. 

I am puzzled by the small size of this polar ring object - the main disk is only 25,000 light years in diameter and the perpendicular larger ring is 40,000 light years.  It would make more sense to me if this object were twice as far away, making these diameters twice as large.  Perhaps the redshift measurements for this object were corrupted by the different axes of rotation.

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