Alitheastronomer - Science Rules

Arp 87:

NGC 3808A (right) & NGC 3808B (left)

NGC 660, an example of the unusually shaped polar ring galaxies. These galaxies are likely to form their structures following violent interactions with other passing galaxies.

Jupiters Great Red Spot is likely a sunburn, not a blush. New science from NASAs Cassini Mission to Saturn based on lab and flyby data.

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Sharpest View of the Andromeda Galaxy, Ever.

The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has captured the sharpest and biggest image ever taken of the Andromeda galaxy — a whopping 69,536 x 22,230 pixels. The enormous image is the biggest Hubble image ever released and shows over 100 million stars and thousands of star clusters embedded in a section of the galaxy’s pancake-shaped disc stretching across over 40,000 light-years.

Use the ZOOM TOOL to view in full detail.

(WARNING: May cause existential crisis)

Whirlpool Galaxy by Alessandro Falesiedi

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It's amazing how these galaxies, that are so unfathomably huge to us, are actually really fragile and delicate in the scheme of things

Top 10 Bizarre Galaxy Pairs From Hubble

“The Arp catalog illustrates galaxies in many different stages of a collision:

* prior to their first close pass, * in the collision process, * subsequent to an interaction but before merging, * and in the final merger stages.

Unlike ellipticals, spirals are easily disturbed, often becoming destroyed entirely by such an interaction.”

When you take a glimpse into the deep Universe, beyond the gas, dust, stars and planets of our own galaxy, you enter the realm of the galaxies. In general, they come in two types: the spirals, with neat, orderly arms, and the ellipticals, with a symmetric, bulging shape. But for everything that exists in the Universe a particular way in general, there are exceptions. In the 1960s, astronomer Halton Arp became fascinated with these exceptions, creating a catalog of 338 examples: the Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies. We now know that most of these are galaxy pairs or triplets in the process of major mergers, displaying features such as tidal disruption, stellar bridges, starbursts and occasionally a rare, ring shape.