Thank you, Ken, for the link to the paper.
This is a tough object, and you have done an excellent job on it.
This paper is an excellent compilation of deep images of various galaxies.....and it could be useful for testing the ability of imagers to reach very deep in their astronomical images.
"Image deeper, sharper, or wider, and you are sure to turn up something new"
I didn't find much about this galaxy in the astronomical papers archive at
http://adsabs.harvard.edu , so it has had little attention from professional astronomers, to date.
S.M. Kent provided some data about this galaxy in the 1984 ApJS, and Googling on this galaxy will find some NIR and Optical imaging data by Peletier and Balcells.
For comparison purposes, I attach the g+r+i bands composite image from SDSS (downloaded from Skyserver DR8) :
This galaxy is nominally an S0 or Very Early Sa galaxy, though it deserves to be said that the S0 morphological class is a "broad church" which encompasses galaxies with giant bulges and minimal disks as well as objects which are more similar to spiral galaxies but without most of the usual ISM and star formation. (A lot of galaxies which are "not quite S0" and "not quite Sa" end up in the S0-a (S0/a) class, which is absolutely the rubbish bin of the Hubble Sequence, as it is negatively defined)
But traditional Hubble classification methods classify only the structure of a 2-D image, and sometimes tell us little about the underlying three-dimensional galactic morphology.
The surface brightness of this galaxy is very modest indeed, judged from the faintness of this galaxy in DSS images. Perhaps the highest contrast of the DSS images of it is at:
http://server1.wikisky.org
(while not the sharpest DSS images, these seem to be at higher contrast than usual)
See also the color composite image at Aladin, which is my favourite version of DSS:
http://aladin.u-strasbg.fr/AladinPreview
I do agree with our mutual friend "renormalised" that the perturbation of this galaxy looks like it could have originated with a perturbing object of significant mass.
The degree of asymmetry or lopsidedness in the apparent (two-dimensional) distribution of the stellar light is remarkably high. The observed morphology is indeed quite singular,at least if we compare the observed morphology to examples of disk galaxies that are
not an immediate product of a major merger between two galaxies.
This is
not one of those galaxies in which there is a large
apparent optical asymmetry caused by OB stars and HII Regions without there being a corresponding asymmetry in the underlying mass-dominant Old Stellar Population which is better traced in the NIR regime. (Unfortunately the NIR image from the 2MASS survey is too faint to show anything meaningful about this galaxy.)
There is little star formation apparent in this galaxy, judging from the lack of FUV emission detected in the GALEX image of it. Its B-V optical color (within the effective aperture) of 1.03 (in Prugniel and Heraudeau's catalog of aperture photometry) is redder than that of any normal spiral galaxy, and in fact this color value is similar to the optical color of an
elliptical galaxy!
This low apparent Star Formation Rate and red optical color strengthens the case for this galaxy being classified as an S0.
However, the morph. is so peculiar, that perhaps an orthodox Hubble type is not applicable.
Thats a background fuzzy with background fuzzies! Incredible, 179 million years back and thats close in the scheme of things! Intergalactic perspective makes my brain hurt
Thanks for the buzz!
