
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
1230 Riceia, provisional designation 1931 TX1, is a stony background asteroid from the central regions of the asteroid belt, approximately 6 kilometers in diameter. It was discovered on 9 October 1931, by German astronomer Karl Reinmuth at the Heidelberg-Königstuhl State Observatory. The asteroid was named after Hugh Rice, amateur astronomer of New York and director of the Museum of Natural Sciences.
Orbit and classification
via Wikipedia infobox
via Wikidata · CC0
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).