This
Astrobin Debut Object, also known as UGC 6665, is a pair of merging galaxies located 280 million light years away in the constellation of Virgo at a declination of 0 degrees. The bright portion of this magnitude 15 object spans only 30 arc-seconds in our apparent view, smaller than our current view of Jupiter. This corresponds to a diameter of 50,000 light years. The star stream extension is much longer, at over 100,000 light years.
In his
Arp catalog, Dr. Arp classified this object into the category of Galaxies with Diffuse Filaments.
The bright central portion of this object is small but deserves a close examination. This object is one of my favorite types of rare DSOs, something that I like to call a late stage merger. Of course, it is difficult to tell whether this is an actual merger or just a single deformed galaxy, although sometimes the data shows 2 distinct star populations. I haven’t been able to find such a study in this case. However, the 2 lobed shape of the main region (with slightly different colors) along with the unique star stream shape suggest to me that these are 2 galaxies in the late stage of merging. Dr. Arp’s images have overexposed cores, so he was never able to see the interesting nature of the central section here.
My Astrobin category of what I consider to be Late Stage Mergers is found
here. As opposed to the objects in the normal
Merging category, these objects have no separation between the 2 former galaxy remnants. There are very few of these seen in the sky, as opposed to the number in my normal “Merging” category. I assume this is because this stage of the process is of much shorter duration.
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