I am really curious to know how it might look through an amateur telescope, and I'd love to see it for myself some day (RA=15 17 14, Dec=+21 35 08 in the Serpens constellation), Astrometry.net can help give an idea - see Hoag's Object images on Flickr found by the service.
|HST Image of Hoag's Object. Credit: NASA.|
So why am writing about Hoag's Object today, well appearing on the arXiV this morning is a paper addressing the formation scenarios for Hoag's Object (Finkelman et al. 2011, MNRAS in press), which struck my interest so I thought I'd write about it. It puts forward a new scenario for the formation of this unusual object as well as talking about the two previously suggested models. In addition they present some new data for our consideration.
The three models discussed are:
1. Ring formed as a collisional ring.
In this model another galaxy would have passed through the centre of Hoag's object, and what is observed is the merger remnant. The Cartwheel Galaxy is perhaps the most famous of this class of objects. It's shown below in a HST image, and illustrates the most obvious problem with interpreting Hoag's Object in this way.
|Cartwheel Galaxy. Credit: HST, NASA|
2. Ring formed through a bar instability which has since dissolved.
In this model at an earlier time there would have been a strong bar, and material would have flowed out along it to form the ring. The main objection to this theory appears to be the lack of evidence for any residual bar in the central spheroid. I should perhaps point out that this was a theory previously put forward by one of the co-authors of today's paper (Noah Brosch), so presumably his co-authorship on this new paper is an indication that he no longer believes this to be the best model.
3. Gas Accretion.
This is the new theory put forward (although I should say it seems rather similar to me to one discussed by Schwiezer et al. 1987). In this model the object has a very low density HI disk which accreted at early times onto the spheroid and is only dense enough to form stars in the ring.
In fact the kinematic data does seem to suggest that Hoag's object (other than having its only visible disk light in a ring of course) is a normal disk galaxy, with the spheroidal component playing the role of a central classical bulge. At the risk of getting too technical in a blog, check out the Halpha velocity map and HI line profile below.
Ignoring the gap in the Halpha velocity map these two observations look to me basically identical to what you would expect from a normal nearly face-on disk galaxy. The classic "double horned" HI profile is usual interpreted as a coming from a rotating disk of HI with a central gap. HI (atomic hydrogen in its ground state) emits (due to hyperfine spitting of the ground state) at a single frequency of 1420 Mz (21cm) - the broadening of the line is caused by Doppler shifting of the emission (indicated along the x-axis is the velocity of the Doppler shifter HI line) and the peaks at the maximum velocity are interpreted as a pile up of HI in the flat part of a galaxy rotation curve (see global HI profiles, or galaxy rotation curves for more information on this).
|HI in Hoag's Object from Schwiezer et al. 1987|
The Halpha velocity map is showing a similar thing. Halpha is a spectral line emitted by excited hydrogen. Again this emits at a single frequency (656.28 nm), which is shifted due to the Doppler effect. The map shows the velocity of this line colour coded such that red indicates a greater velocity than the mean for the galaxy and blue a smaller. This is again interpreted as a rotating disk of hydrogen with the upper left moving away from use and the lower right towards us. The velocities are very consistent with what's seen in the HI profile, suggesting the HI is indeed coming from the ring.
|Halpha velocity field in Hoag's Object from Finkelman et al. 2011|
What is needed to complete this picture is a HI map of Hoag's Object. I think this could be fairly easilly done with the EVLA, and I will be interested to see it when it is.