
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
774 Armor is a minor planet (specifically an asteroid) orbiting in the main belt. It was discovered on 13 December 1913, in Paris by French astronomer Charles le Morvan and was named after the Celtic region of Armorica. The asteroid is orbiting at a distance of 3.05 AU with a period of 5.32 yr and an eccentricity of 0.169. The orbital plane is inclined by an angle of 5.56° to the plane of the ecliptic.
In the SMASS-I taxonomy, this is classified as an S-type asteroid. It spans a girth of approximately 50 km. The rotation of this asteroid is commensurate with the length of an Earth day, requiring measurements from more than one latitude for full coverage. Photometric observations from the US and Australia in 2012 provided an estimated rotation period of 25.107±0.005 h with a brightness variation of 0.16±0.02 in magnitude. This is consistent with the results of an earlier study in 2006.
via Wikipedia infobox
via Wikidata · CC0
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).