Complex and beautiful.
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B_SIDE
11:00. Haven't seen anything quite like it.
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ElisabethB
moderator
Really great merger !
Nice catch !Posted
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JasonJason
Did you mark it as a lens? There appears to be some blue around the edges.
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Budgieye
moderator
The blue areas look like spiral arms that have star formation whichhappens during a merger.
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Tom_Collett
scientist
Yeah, blue does not necessarily mean lens. Otherwise we'd just ask a computer to find all the bright blue objects in the image.
The problem is that star formation in spiral galaxies also looks bright and blue (The background galaxies are blue because they have lots of star formation in them). The whole point of spacewarps is that people can tell the difference between blue stuff that looks like a lens and blue stuff that looks like star formation in an unlensed galaxy. Happy hunting.
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ElisabethB
moderator
Tx Tom for the more elaborate explanation ! 😄
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B_SIDE
Star formation seems a likely culprit. But I suppose there's no reason it can't be both! Tagged and bagged. 😃
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anupreeta
scientist, admin
in response to B SIDE's comment.
I guess the main point here is, if you see such merging galaxies or galaxies with lot of gas around them - be a little more skeptical of any blue features you see. Try and look for expected lensing image patterns, correct curvature and similarity in colors of the lensed images, etc. If these blue dots/arcs do satisfy most of these criteria, then you could consider it as a lens. This one tends to fall in the non-lens category going by these criteria!!
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