George's Random Astronomical Object

Located within the Local Group, the dwarf galaxy IC 1613 has been popular with professional astronomers for a variety of reasons, and it is also a notable albeit difficult-to-see amateur astronomy object as well.

GRB 980326 was the first gamma ray burst to be associated with a supernova, which was truly groundbreaking even if the astronomers who discovered it were probably using Netscape at the time.

Sakurai's Object was discovered in 1996 by the amateur astronomer Yukio Sakurai, who had been searching for comets but who had instead found a dying star that had brifly undergone a final burst of fusion, causing it to increase dramatically in brightness.

The open cluster NGC 3680 is 1.4 billion years old, making it unusually long-lived for such a cluster.

As the second brightest star in the night sky, Canopus is associated with many different myths, yet as the closest yellow supergiant to Earth, the star is also scientifically important.

The hyperluminous infrared galaxy IRAS 10214+4724 was the most distant infrared object seen by astronomers in the 1980s.

GX Monocerotis is a evolved star near the end of its life that is expelling its outer gas layers, and because the star is in orbit in a binary star system, those gas layers have formed a spiral pattern.

The center of the barred spiral galaxy Messier 71 contains multiple regions where stars are forming as well as an inactive supermassive black home that needs some caffeine.

Eta Aquilae was the first Cepheid variable ever discovered, but this class of stars was named after Delta Cephei instead.

The North Ecliptical Pole points to a location perpendicular to the plane of the Solar System, which makes it a unique place for certain types of astronomical observations.

The spiral galaxy NGC 6814 is a source of strong but variable X-ray emission that astronomers are using to measure the mass of a supermassive black hole at its center.

The abnormal-looking globular cluster Messier 71 is unusual in that its stars contain an excessive amount of heavy elements and in that it is being gravitationally shredded by the Milky Way.

The binary star system b Centauri contains an exoplanet named b Centauri b that, despite its confusing name, has changed astronomers' perspectives on how and where planets can form.

Even though HD 106252 has an exoplanet orbiting it, astronomers are much more interested in the fact that HD 106252 looks very similar to the Sun.

VER J0521+211 is a distant galaxy that produces gamma rays with such high energy that, when the gamma rays hit the Earth's atmosphere, the photons transform into electrons and positrons.

UX Ari is an RS CVn type variable star system, which is a confusing way to classify variable star systems but which means that UX Ari contains two stars very close together with complex, interacting magnetic fields that produce all sorts of weird effects.

NGC 7457 was one of the first things imaged by the Hubble Space Telescope, which meant that the images of it were relatively blurry, but this is not the most interesting fact about this lenticular galaxy.

SPT-CL J0546-5345 is an abnormally large cluster that formed very quickly after the Big Bang, which places some strong constraints of models of the formation and evolution of the universe.

UM 425 could be either a pair of very similar quasars at the same distance from Earth or a single quasar that has been gravitationally lensed so that it appears twice in the sky.

VW Cephei is an eclipsing binary star system containing two stars that are so close that they share an outer gas layer.

Chi Cygni is a Mira-type variable star with some of the most extreme variations in brightness among any variable stars in the sky.

3C 147 is not the first object ever identified as a quasar, but it is sort of one of the first two objects ever called a quasar.

Astronomers may not have found an exoplanet orbiting the star HD 191089, but they found the next best thing.

The WLM Galaxy is located at the edge of the Local Group where it is relatively unaffected by everything happening around the Milky Way and the Andromeda Galaxy.

Jets of gas that are several light years long are emerging from the blue supergiant MWC 137, and no one knows why.