This
Astrobin Debut Object is a pair of interacting galaxies located 420 million light years away in the constellation of Bootes at a declination of +9 degrees. In his
Arp catalog, Dr. Arp classified this object into the category of Galaxies with Narrow Counter-tails.
The larger spiral galaxy at the center of the image is MCG+02-38-020. This magnitude 15 galaxy spans 40 arc-seconds in our apparent view, which corresponds to a diameter of 80,000 light years. The smaller spiral galaxy below is UGC 9561. This magnitude 16 galaxy is only 40,000 light years in diameter.
The feature of this image is the star streams, in 3 sections:
1. A faint star stream bridge connects the 2 galaxies.
2. From the top galaxy, a short star stream extends up and to the right.
3. The true highlight is the narrow bright beautiful star stream arc which extends down from the lower galaxy for a length of almost 200,000 light years.
Several of the small background galaxies are 2 billion light years away.
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