Galaxy Zoo Starburst Talk

A bar-spiral galaxy?

  • Foundren_Shi by Foundren_Shi

    As Spacer fielding has said in the comment , it looks like a bar-spiral galaxy. But I can't see any spiral arm pattern.Can it be some dust cloud blown away by the active core?

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  • JeanTate by JeanTate

    There is, to me, a hint of an arm coming from the end of the upper bar, going towards the right. But I agree that it's hard to see any arms.

    Active cores (nuclei) can 'blow bubbles' - I think the Circinus galaxy is a good exampleWP - but such bubbles are mostly gas (plasma), not dust, and they blow out of the plane of the disk, not into it.

    More likely here is the formation of a ringed galaxy, with star-formation pretty much finished many hundreds of millions of years ago. This happens due to a process called secular evolution, and was discussed in this Galaxy Zoo blog: Live Chat: Galactic Rings, Secular Evolution and The Good Old Days.

    Here is the DR10 image of this galaxy; can you see arms in this image?

    enter image description here

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