Posts Tagged ‘NGC 1347’

NGC 1347

Friday, January 1st, 2010

The following is a “lesser known” example of discordant redshifts from the southern hemisphere that is known by many names. NGC 1347 was first listed as Arp 39 in Dr. Halton Arp’s Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies published by Caltech in 1966.  It is listed in his and Barry Madore’s A Catalogue of Southern Peculiar Galaxies and Associations (Cambridge University Press, 1987) as AM 0327-222.  But it is also listed as AM 0328-222 in Dr. Arp’s book Quasars, Redshifts and Controversies (Interstellar Media, 1987) and his article published in Volume 263 of the The Astrophysical Journal in 1982.  The following is the best image I could find for this pair of objects.  It is a photograph taken with the 48-inch UK Schmidt Telescope in New South Wales, Australia sometime in the 1970’s.  I have cropped the original image a bit in order to fit it on this page but it is otherwise unaltered.

NGC 1347Although the photograph is somewhat grainy it is quite apparent that there is a smaller galaxy immediately adjacent to the main galaxy at its southern end.  It also appears quite possible that these two objects are physically connected.  However, if they are physically connected then how to account for their vastly discordant redshifts?  The redshift of the larger galaxy at 0.00587 z would place its distance at approximately 104 million light-years from Earth using a so-called Hubble Constant value of 55 (km/s)/Mpc.  And although NED does not list a redshift value for the smaller object, Dr. Arp measured it to be over 0.068 z which would indicate a supposed distance of over 1.15 billion light-years from Earth.  This is over 11 times the distance of the larger object.   A physical connection notwithstanding, if the smaller galaxy were to be viewed at the same distance as the larger galaxy it would appear over 3 times the size of the larger galaxy.  This would make it the largest galaxy ever observed for its type in the known Universe!  Obviously these measurements highlight some serious discreprencies and further observations of these objects need to be made.

The mission of the Discordancy Report is to show examples of redshift discordancies and present an opportunity to critically analyze the observations while also nurturing an interest to perform further observations.  NGC 1347 is a perfect example of an object that clearly questions the assumption that extragalactic redshifts are indicative of distance and the result of the expansion of the Universe since the “Big Bang”.  Yet, the best image I could find came from observations made over thirty years ago from a telescope less than a quarter of the size of those available today.  I was unable to find any images of NGC 1347 from any modern large telescope that covers the southern hemisphere including the SALT, the Gemini South or even the HST.  I will continue to pursue observational data from these and other large telescopes as their powerful optics could one day help finally bring to light the true connection between extragalactic objects and the true meaning of their discordant redshifts.

I encourage all visitors to this site to pursue their own observations and please feel free to contribute to the ones I present here and even submit your own.

Thanks for reading!

Shannon