Cosmic Owl

This article is about the galaxy pair of colliding ring galaxies. For the pair of colliding spiral galaxies, see NGC 2207 and IC 2163. For the fictional character from Adventure Time, see Adventure Time season 6. For other uses, see Cosmic Owl (disambiguation).

The Cosmic Owl, located at redshift z=1.14, 8.8 billion light-years away, is a pair of galaxies of two nearly identical ring galaxies undergoing collision and merger, The two rings form the eyes of the owl, while the merger zone forms the beak, giving this celestial object the appearance of an owl's face. This collision represents an important observational target for galaxy research, as several interactions are occurring in the system, to test theories of galaxy evolution. The merging galaxies have collisional starbust, AGN jet impingment and starburst, ring galaxies themselves, and the galaxy collision itself.^[4][3][5]

Cosmic Owl
Observation data
Constellation	Sextans [1]
Right ascension	10h 00m 14.189s [2]
Declination	+02° 13′ 11.72″[2]
Redshift	1.14 [2]
Characteristics
Type	Collisional ring galaxies (CRG) [2] Binary active galactic nuclei (AGN) [2] Galaxy pair
Mass	3.20×1011 [3] M☉
Size	Length: 5.2×104 ly (4.9×1017 km; 3.1×1017 mi) Width: 2.6×104 ly (2.5×1017 km; 1.5×1017 mi)
Other designations
[ALMA] 2016.1.01040.S