
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
931 Whittemora (prov. designation: A920 FB or 1920 GU) is a metallic background asteroid, approximately 46 kilometers (29 miles) in diameter, located in the outer region of the asteroid belt. It was discovered by French astronomer François Gonnessiat at the Algiers Observatory in North Africa on 19 March 1920. The M-type asteroid has a rotation period of 19.2 hours. It was named after American archaeologist Thomas Whittemore (1871–1950).
Orbit and classification
via Wikipedia infobox
via Wikidata · CC0
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).