September 15, 2020

Grus Triplet (Summer 2018)


I've been saving this data till I could look at it again with a better eye.  This data comes from an observatory in Australia.

These three galaxies appear in the constellation Grus (the crane).   They are, from upper left to lower right, NGC 7582, 7590, and 7599.  The trio and one other companion, NGC 7552 (off the top of this frame), lie about 60 million light years distant.  The quartet is gravitationally interactive, and these three show tidal effects from each other's pull.  https://www.aanda.org/articles/aa/pdf/2005/01/aagi011.pdf.  One tidal tail stretches almost all the way from NGC 7582 to NGC 7590, but the tail is too dim and the wrong part of the spectrum to appear in this image.

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