Friday, November 16, 2012

APOD 2.4

Aloha! Reporting from the North Gemini telescope on Mauna Kea, this is not your regular stock image. Nope, this is NGC 660, floating in over 20 million light-years away within the limits of Pisces, presenting a rather odd appearance. NGC 660 is a polar ring galaxy, meaning that the dust, stars, planets, and so on all orbit around the galactic disc while sectionalised by rings, which in total span over 50 000 light-years. This is a rare moment for a rare sort of galaxy, for some sort of intersection caused a graviational pull that extracted some of the pink of forming stars and threw off the disc's usual configuration, leaving the trail of debris. Though you can't see it, in this picture lies an unseen halo...made of dark matter!

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