
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
275 Sapientia is a very large main belt asteroid. It was discovered by Austrain astronomer Johann Palisa on 15 April 1888 in Vienna. This object is named for the Roman personification of wisdom, Sophia.
This object is orbiting the Sun at a distance of 2.77 km with an eccentricity of 0.16 and an orbital period of 4.61 km. The orbital period is inclined at an angle of 4.76° It is classified as a C-type asteroid and is probably composed of carbonaceous material.
via Wikipedia infobox
via Wikidata · CC0
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).