George's Random Astronomical Object

Although at first NGC 6781 may look like a spherical planetary nebula, it actually has a cylindrical shape, which has rather complex scientific implications for analyzing this object.

The red dwarf HD 260655 has two large, hot, rocky planets orbiting very close to it.

As the largest open cluster that anyone has found in the Milky Way, Westerlund 1 contains a lot of rare and weird stars.

The evolved red star HD 214362 is orbiting the center of the Milky Way in a very eccentric way (as in either its orbit is a very elongated ellipse or its orbit is just plainly strange).

In 1970, the quasar 4C 05.34 was the most distant known object in the universe, but this is not the only interesting fact about this object.

A large mass of gas fell into the lenticular galaxy NGC 3593 about 2 billion years ago, and this gas both changed the appearance of the galaxy and also created new stars that now orbit the galaxy in the opposite direction from the older stars.

What may be most interesting about the pulsar PSR J2124-3358 is not that it is spinning very rapidly but that stellar winds from the pulsar have collided with the interstellar medium, producing a glowing bow shock.

The star WR 124 (also called Merrill's Star, although that name ignores two of the people involved in the discovery) is a really hot Wolf-Rayet star that has produced the surrounding nebula M1-67 (which has no relation to Messier 1) and that is hurling through the Milky Way in an unusual direction at an unusual speed.

The star HD 131835 had a circumstellar disk of dust and gas that technically is neither a debris disk nor a protoplanetary disk but instead some sort of weird hybrid of these two things.

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 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.