
NGC 3660 and Burçin's Galaxy
2026-05-26
The upper galaxy might be more photogenic, but the lower galaxy is more unusual. The galaxy up top is NGC 3660, a spiral galaxy similar to our own Milky Way galaxy in that it has several bright blue spiral arms and a central bar of stars, dust, and gas. Captured by chance in the featured deep and colorful image, surprisingly, is SN 2026cff, a supernova found just to the right of the central bar. Farther in the distance is the bottom galaxy, known informally as Burçin’s galaxy, but formally cataloged as LEDA 1000714. The center of this galaxy appears to be an old elliptical galaxy, but it is strangely surrounded by not one but two rings of stars. What created Burçin's galaxy is a mystery and remains a continuing topic of research, but it likely involves the accretion of one or more smaller galaxies.
via NASA APOD
645 Agrippina, provisional designation 1907 AG, is a stony asteroid from the outer region of the asteroid belt, roughly 30 kilometers in diameter. It was discovered by American astronomer reverend Joel Metcalf at Taunton, Massachusetts, USA, on 13 September 1907.
The S-type asteroid orbits the Sun at a distance of 2.7–3.7 AU once every 5 years and 9 months (2,103 days). Its orbit shows an eccentricity of 0.15 and is tilted by 7 degrees to the plane of the ecliptic. A photometric light-curve analysis from the 1980s and a provisional observation in 2004 rendered a rotation period of 32.6 and 34.4 hours, respectively.
via Wikipedia infobox
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Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).