George's Random Astronomical Object

The Fourcade-Figueroa Galaxy is another example of a very flat disk galaxy seen edge-on from Earth, but that's not the only thing that makes this galaxy unusual.

The gravitationally lensed quasar SBS 1520+530 has been used in a unique way to measure the Hubble constant, but the derived value is rather low.

HD 210121 is a fairly ordinary blue star located behind a relatively thick cloud of interstellar gas and dust, providing astronomers with a unique opportinity to study that dust.

The Cepheus Flare is a nearby regions where a series of supernova explosions have counterintuitively triggered the formation of stars.

The red dwarf TOI-700 has at least four exoplanets orbiting it, and two of them are Earth-sized exoplanets lying within the star system's habitable zone.

G191-B2B is a hot white dwarf with a layer of nearly pure oxygen that has been used as a flux calibration source for one particularly famous telescope.

VY Canis Majoris is not only much, much larger than the Sun but is also ejecting blobs of gas that are forming molecules and dust.

3C 324 was once identified as a possible gravitational lens where one galaxy was bending the light from a galaxy behind it, but it turned out to be something different.

NGC 2639 may look like an ordinary spiral galaxy, but it contains an active galactic nucleus with jets of gas that have emerged from that nucleus in four different directions, which is, to use the technical term, quite weird.

LGS 3 (also known as the Pisces Dwarf Galaxy) is a nearby but faint dwarf galaxy that has provided some interesting clues as to how stars formed in the early universe.

While not many professional astronomers have spent much time looking at the open cluster Messier 103, it is still a spectacular object to see in an amateur astronomy telescope.

Astronomers have been studying the radiowave emission from the cluster of galaxies Abell 4038 quite intently and have provided both conventional and unconventional explanations for its origin.

The southern open cluster IC 2602, also known as the Theta Carinae Cluster or the Southern Pleiades, may not be as famous as some open clusters visible from the Northern Hemisphere, but it is still a good place for professional astronomers to study young stars, and it's also a good amateur astronomy target.

Baade's Window is an unusual hole through the interstellar dust in the Milky Way's disk through which astronomers can very clearly see the stars near the center of our galaxy.

Markarian 231 is now widely recognized not only as the closest quasar to Earth but also as a very bright ultraluminous infrared galaxy.

The pulsar PSR J1022+1001 is one of a small subclass of pulsars named millisecond pulsars because they rotate one every few milliseconds.

The lenticular galaxy NGC 1172 contains two different populations of globular clusters, which indicates something about the history of the galaxy.

Dy Pegasi is an SX Phoenicis type variable star, and SX Phoenicis type variable stars are a subset of Delta Scuti type variable stars, and this episode explains why that is confusing but what it also actually means.

The spiral galaxy NGC 3718 has an unusually weird spiral shape, which belies its unusual history.

While amateur astronomers know that Albireo is a very spectacular-looking double star, professional astronomers are more interested in the dynamical complexities of Albireo's two star systems.

The gamma ray burst GRB 020819 took place in a galaxy containing so much light-obscuring interstellar dust that people initially misidentified which galaxy contained the burst.

The nearby Sun-like star HD 69830 may have three exoplanets orbiting it, but astronomers seem more focused on trying to understand a hard-to-explain dust disk in the star system.

Z Ursa Minor belongs to a class of variable stars that occasionally produce puffs of dust, but this is not the weeirdest thing about them.

The nearby face-on spiral galaxy Messier 101 is one of the most popular galaxies in the sky for astronomers to study, particularly in terms of studying the relative abundances of various elements within the galaxy.

A 0535+26 is a rather unusual star system called a Be high mass X-ray binary that periodically produces bursts of X-ray emission.