Arp 184’s single broad arm hints at a unique past, earning it a place in a famous catalog of peculiar galaxies.
The Hubble Space Telescope captured the oddly shaped Arp 184 (NGC 1961), which sits about 190 million light-years away. Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, J. Dalcanton, R. J. Foley (UC Santa Cruz), C. Kilpatrick
The NASA and European Space Agency’s Hubble Space Telescope snapped a mesmerizing shot of an astronomical oddball, known as Arp 184 or NGC 1961. This strange spiral galaxy’s single broad arm earned it a place in Halton Arp’s Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies, published in 1966. That structure, along with multiple past supernovae, makes it an interesting subject for astronomers.
Arp 184 resides approximately 190 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Camelopardalis the Giraffe. The galaxy’s intriguing appearance presents a valuable opportunity for astronomers studying galactic evolution and structure. The distorted nature of its spiral arm may indicate past gravitational interactions with other galaxies or unusual internal dynamics that have shaped its development over billions of years.
This Hubble photo pieces together data from three Snapshot programs — quick observations taken in the time between fulfilling other science proposals. One program looked at objects from Arp’s atlas along with targets from another of his catalogs, A Catalogue of Southern Peculiar Galaxies and Associations, created with collaborator Barry Madore. The other Snapshot programs examined different astronomical events, including supernovae. Arp 184 is a hotbed for these stellar explosions, hosting four supernovae in the past 30 years.
