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Old 17-11-2020, 07:25 AM
Weltevreden SA's Avatar
Weltevreden SA (Dana)
Dana in SA

Weltevreden SA is offline
 
Join Date: Apr 2012
Location: Nieu Bethesda, Karoo, South Africa
Posts: 216
The 'cinnamon bun' galaxy name isn't the only thing weird about it

NGC 12588 was a cosmic nobody till its image started showing up in SciTech Daily & all The Regular Suspects earlier today. Have any of you logged it, and what did you see?

So now that it's a somebody, what is it? It appears to have an unusual hexagonal morphology of 6 vestigial arms visible that emerge from a featureless surface only near the outer Lindblad resonance, where most gassy galaxies consist mainly of atomic hydrogen and shouldn't have young molecular HII clouds making scads of blue stars. It also appears to have a higher surface density in the 3:00 o'clock to 8 o'clock sector, possibly a remnant of ancient interaction with a galaxy not readily discernible here. This is a hard critter to track down—none of the papers in the 24 cited in Simbad provide any more than positional, proper/peculiar motion, and association data. The only published motion data is from 1988. No spectra available. The galaxy appears to have low H-alpha emission density and a marked absence of dust features. It could be an SO in mid-evolution between dusty spiral and featureless lenticular. If X-ray images were available we might see the telltale blue trail of ram pressure stripping. If it's an outlier member of the Perseus SSC (as its sky position suggests) it may be in rapid free-fall toward NGC 1275. However, the required velocity would have to have been imparted during a multi-body interaction in which 12588 was ejected at speed as the lowest-mass member. Its 2D sky position isn't its 3D position and there's no constraining distance data available. It might be one of the triple systems cited in KARACHENTSEVA V.E.1988, but that paper apparently hasn't been translated & in unavailable on ADS.

Any clues from you lads over there?



=Dana in S Africa
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