Robert's Quartet is a compact

galaxy group A galaxy group or group of galaxies (GrG) is an aggregation of galaxies comprising about 50 or fewer gravitationally bound members, each at least as luminous as the Milky Way (about 1010 times the luminosity of the Sun); collections of galaxi ...

approximately 160 million

light-year A light-year, alternatively spelled light year (ly or lyr), is a unit of length used to express astronomical distances and is equal to exactly , which is approximately 9.46 trillion km or 5.88 trillion mi. As defined by the International Astr ...

s away in the

constellation A constellation is an area on the celestial sphere in which a group of visible stars forms Asterism (astronomy), a perceived pattern or outline, typically representing an animal, mythological subject, or inanimate object. The first constellati ...

Phoenix. It is a family of four very different

galaxies A galaxy is a system of stars, stellar remnants, interstellar gas, dust, and dark matter bound together by gravity. The word is derived from the Greek ' (), literally 'milky', a reference to the Milky Way galaxy that contains the Solar Sys ...

whose proximity to each other has caused the creation of about 200 star-forming regions and pulled out a stream of gas and dust 100,000 light years long. Its members are NGC 87, NGC 88, NGC 89 and NGC 92, discovered by

John Herschel Sir John Frederick William Herschel, 1st Baronet (; 7 March 1792 – 11 May 1871) was an English polymath active as a mathematician, astronomer, chemist, inventor and experimental photographer who invented the blueprint and did botanical work. ...

on the 30 September 1834. The quartet is one of the best examples of compact galaxy groups. Because such groups contain four to eight galaxies in a very small region they are excellent laboratories for the study of galactic interactions and their effects, in particular on the formation of stars. The quartet has a total visual magnitude of almost 13. The brightest member of the group is NGC 92, having the blue magnitude of 13.8. On the sky, the four galaxies are all within a circle of radius of 1.6 arcmin, corresponding to about 75,000 light-years. It was named by

Halton Arp Halton Christian "Chip" Arp (March 21, 1927 – December 28, 2013) was an American astronomer. He is remembered for his 1966 book ''Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies'', which catalogued unusual-looking galaxies and presented their images. Arp was als ...

and Barry F. Madore, who compiled ''A Catalogue of Southern Peculiar Galaxies and Associations'' in 1987. Arp and Madore named Robert's Quartet after Robert Freedman who generated many of the updated positions of galaxies in the catalogue.

Members

References

External links

ESo: Cosmic Portrait of a Perturbed Family

* {{Sky, 00, 21, 23.075, -, 48, 37.75, 39.5, 180000000 Phoenix (constellation) Galaxy clusters

Members

See also

References

External links