Facts about Mayall's Object
- 07
Within Mayall's Object's three merging galaxies, ultraviolet observations have detected at least five distinct regions of intense starburst activity, each producing millions of new stars annually.
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Approximately 10 billion solar masses of gas have been stripped from Mayall's Object's outer regions through tidal interactions, creating the extended debris structures surrounding the system.
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Nicholas Mayall discovered this interacting galaxy system in 1940 at Lick Observatory using photographic plate observations with the 36-inch refractor telescope.
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Spectroscopic analysis of Mayall's Object reveals active star formation rates exceeding those in normal galaxies by a factor of approximately 10, driven by the collision's compression of interstellar gas.
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Mayall's Object displays a remarkable tidal tail structure extending over 500,000 light-years, evidence of the violent gravitational forces unleashed during its galactic merger.
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In 2002, observations from the Hubble Space Telescope revealed that Mayall's Object contains approximately 1 trillion stars distributed across its three galaxy components.
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The triplet galaxy system Mayall's Object, located approximately 980 million light-years away, resulted from a collision between two galaxies approximately 1 billion years ago.