This
Astrobin Debut Object is located in the constellation of Ursa Major at a declination of +54 degrees. It was classified by Dr. Arp into the category of Galaxies with Jets. Imaging this object is a challenge because of the nearby magnitude 8.5 blue star HD 99222.
This tiny, unique and fascinating object appears to be galaxies connected by a long tidal star stream. However, sources differ on the exact nature of these distant objects. Most describe 3 galaxies here, although my guess that the top one is a star cloud. It is very hard to tell. I could find no detailed image of this object.
The bottom galaxy is the 16.5 magnitude Seyfert galaxy Mrk 40. It is 1 arc-minute long in our apparent view, is located 300 million light years away, and has a diameter of 80,000 light years.
The middle galaxy is 2MASS J11253523+5423144, also 300 million light years away.
The top object is listed as galaxy 2MFGC 8934, but no information is available on this one. And as I said above, I don’t believe it is a galaxy.
Why do I think that this is 2 galaxies and not 3? There are a number of examples of 2 galaxy systems which generate a star stream that has a cloud at the end . Examples include
Arp 105 and
Arp 190. I can visualize how these would occur. But 3 galaxies lined up like this? I think the tidal star stream dynamics would be more complex and result in something other than a straight line. We need a Hubble image of this one!
If all of these objects are 300 million light years away, then the star stream is 100,000 light years long. This is fairly long, but not extreme. The star stream of
Arp 295 for example, approaches 1 miliion light years long.
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