The Fourcade-Figueroa Galaxy is named after the two people who discovered it in 1970 while observing at the Cerro Tololo Interamerical Observatory [1]. Carlos Fourcade was at the time a member of the research staff at the Observatorio Astronómico in Argentina, while Eduardo Figueroa was a night assistant working at Cerro Tololo. For some reason, the two authors of the paper announcing the discovery of this galaxy are Horacio Dottori and Carlos Fourcade [1]. Figueroa did not get invited to be a co-author on the paper, although he does get acknowledged in the first paragraph [1]. Also, very interestingly, a Google search for either Carlos Fourcade or Eduardo Figueroa will turn up lots of other unrelated people with the same name, including, for some reason, professional athletes.
Anyway, the Fourcade Figueroa Galaxy is a very flat disk galaxy that is seen edge-on from Earth, so it looks like a faint, hazy streak of light on the sky, and many astronomers have referred to it as superthin. A typical spiral galaxy has a disk of gas and dust that bisect a spherical bulge of stars, but in the case of the Fourcade-Figueroa Galaxy, it has no bulge, so it could be thought of as pure disk.
The galaxy is located in the constellation Centaurus about 3 degrees away from the galaxy Centaurus A, which can be thought of as a large elliptical galaxy even though it has a weird warped disk of gas and dust inside it. For a while, the close proximity of the two galaxies on the sky implied that the Fourcade Figueroa Galaxy was part of the same group of galaxies as Centaurus A. In fact, one rather weird paper published in 1992 claimed that the Fourcade-Figueroa Galaxy was a filamentary structure created by a gravitational interaction between Centaurus A and the dwarf galaxy NGC 5237 [2]. However, the Cosmicflows2 survey has determined that the distance to the Fourcade-Figueroa Galaxy is 22.7 million light years (6.95 Mpc) [3], which would place it 10.7 million light years behind Centaurus A [3], so the two galaxies are really too far apart to have anything to do with each other.
The reason why the Fourcade-Figueroa Galaxy is a flat disk is most likely because it has somehow managed to avoid any major gravitational interactions with other galaxies. When a small galaxy falls into a much larger disk-shaped galaxy, the orbits of the stars in the larger galaxy will not be affected that much, but the orbits of the stars in the smaller galaxy will end up being scrambled, and those stars will eventually end up orbiting the center of the larger galaxy in a spherical structure that would more or less constitute a bulge. Since the Fourcade-Figueroa Galaxy is a disk with absolutely no bulge, it looks like it has mostly avoided any of these types merger events with other galaxies. On the other hand, observations of the gas in the outer parts of the galaxy that were published in 2021 show that the disk is warped, which means that the Fourcade-Figueroa Galaxy is not completely isolated but has had some sort of gravitational interactions with other galaxies even if those other galaxies have not merged with the Fourcade-Figueroa Galaxy [4]. That 2021 paper also stated that the Fourcade-Figueroa Galaxy is very very thin because its dark matter halo is compact [4], but I quite honestly did not understand that argument, and I think the most straightforward conclusion is that the Fourcade-Figueroa Galaxy is thin because nothing has fallen into the center of the galaxy, even if it has interacted with other galaxies.
One final thing worth saying about this galaxy is that Horacio Dottori published a paper in 2024 with another Argentinian astronomer named Rubén Díaz that performed a detailed analysis of the infrared light from the Fourcade-Figueroa Galaxy and found a compact infrared region within the center of the object [5]. In astronomy, infrared light comes primarily from interstellar dust, and interstellar dust tends to be found in the nebulae where stars are forming, so Dottori and Diaz suggested that they might have found a dusty nuclear region in Fourcade-Figueroa Galaxy where a large number of young stars were just beginning to form [5]. Since I work on interstellar dust and star formation in other galaxies, I would be interested to see if these conclusions can be verified with additional observations with something like the James Webb Space Telescope or the Atacama Large Millimeter/Submillimeter Array.
I would also be interested to see how much longer Horacio Dottori can continue to publish papers on the Fourcade-Figueroa Galaxy. The time gap between his first paper with Carlos Fourcade about the discovery of this galaxy and his latest paper on the infrared emission from the galaxy's nucleus is 51 years. My question is can Horacio Dottori extend his streak of publishing papers about this galaxy up to 60 or even 70 years. We will need to wait until 2043 to find out.