by jesse » Mon Oct 24, 2005 11:20 pm
In the course of browsing the links for the Ring Galaxy, I looked again at the Mice
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap020506.html
Unlike this ring, long ago attacked by a smaller galaxy, the cores of the
two Mice seem equal in size and still intensely interacting. The Mice are identified as spiral galaxies. It seems to me that, if the right Mouse were not interacting with a second galaxy, the long "tail" on the right would be a normal edge-on galactic disk.
With this idea in mind, the left Mouse seems to have radically disrupted the edge-on disk of the right Mouse -- to the point of obliteration. The full photo --
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/image/ ... st_big.jpg
-- shows that remaining traces of the disrupted disk are pulled upward by the intruding galaxy, not tilted, but apparently offset en masse.
Do you think that today's APOD ring would be highly warped from the plane of the original spiral? Would compression waves propagate uniformly radially, if the material is not in a plane? (Today's link to "wave of star formation" indicates that this is probably a debatable question.)
Do you think that the right Mouse, viewed from a polar perspective, would now -- or later -- show either a ring, like today's APOD ring, or a spiral structure like Spitzer's Andromeda two days ago?
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap051020.html
The left Mouse was identified as a spiral galaxy. Are we sure of that? Can we identify any material originally belonging to a disk structure for the left Mouse? (I would suppose that detailed spectra could tell something about this, but I did not see any reference to such investigations, and perhaps it has not been done yet.) In what orientation did the disk originally lie? Why are its remnants not prominent somewhere?
In the course of browsing the links for the Ring Galaxy, I looked again at the Mice http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap020506.html
Unlike this ring, long ago attacked by a smaller galaxy, the cores of the
two Mice seem equal in size and still intensely interacting. The Mice are identified as spiral galaxies. It seems to me that, if the right Mouse were not interacting with a second galaxy, the long "tail" on the right would be a normal edge-on galactic disk.
With this idea in mind, the left Mouse seems to have radically disrupted the edge-on disk of the right Mouse -- to the point of obliteration. The full photo -- http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/image/0205/ngc4676_hst_big.jpg
-- shows that remaining traces of the disrupted disk are pulled upward by the intruding galaxy, not tilted, but apparently offset en masse.
Do you think that today's APOD ring would be highly warped from the plane of the original spiral? Would compression waves propagate uniformly radially, if the material is not in a plane? (Today's link to "wave of star formation" indicates that this is probably a debatable question.)
Do you think that the right Mouse, viewed from a polar perspective, would now -- or later -- show either a ring, like today's APOD ring, or a spiral structure like Spitzer's Andromeda two days ago? http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap051020.html
The left Mouse was identified as a spiral galaxy. Are we sure of that? Can we identify any material originally belonging to a disk structure for the left Mouse? (I would suppose that detailed spectra could tell something about this, but I did not see any reference to such investigations, and perhaps it has not been done yet.) In what orientation did the disk originally lie? Why are its remnants not prominent somewhere?