NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope captured this image, which includes multiple galaxies. The lone galaxy in the upper right corner is LEDA 58109. In the image, it is accompanied by two other galactic objects in the lower left corner. One is an active galactic nucleus called SDSS J162558.14+435746.4, which partially obscures the galaxy SDSS J162557.25+435743.5, which is partially visible to the right behind the active galactic nucleus.
Galaxies are often classified into two categories: spiral and elliptical. But the diversity in this Hubble image alone shows how there is a much more complex web of galaxy classifications. This includes galaxies that have extremely luminous active galactic nuclei within them.
The galaxies in the image also illustrate the wide variety of names these star systems have. For example, some are relatively short like LEDA 58109, while others have longer names that may be a bit challenging to remember like other galaxies in the image. This is due to the different cataloging systems that map and identify the different galaxies in our sky.
But no single catalog can be considered comprehensive and sometimes covers overlapping regions of the sky. This means that the same galaxy can belong to different catalogs and therefore can have different names. An example of this is LEDA 58109, which is its name in the LEDA galaxy database, but is also known as MCG+07-34-030 in the MCG galaxy catalog and SDSS J162551.50+435747.5 in the SDSS catalog. The SDSS catalog also lists the two galaxies on the right.
LEDA, which stands for Lyon-Meudon Extragalactic Database (LEDA), is a galaxy database first created in 1983 at the Lyon Observatory. MCG stands for Morphological Catalog of Galaxies (or Morfologiceskij Katalog Galaktik in Russian). The Russian one was published in five parts between 1962 and 1974. SDSS stands for Sloan Digital Sky Survey and is a catalog created using multispectral images and spectroscopic redshift data from a special 2.5-meter wide-angle optical telescope.
Add Comment