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                        Astronomy Picture of the Day

    Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our
      fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation
                    written by a professional astronomer.

                               2025 January 9

                        Peculiar Galaxies of Arp 273
                    Image Credit & Copyright: Dave Doctor

   Explanation: The colorful, spiky stars are in the foreground of this
   image taken with a small telescope on planet Earth. They lie well
   within our own Milky Way Galaxy. But the two eye-catching galaxies in
   the frame lie far beyond the Milky Way, at a distance of over 300
   million light-years. The galaxies' twisted and distorted appearance is
   due to mutual gravitational tides as the pair engage in close
   encounters. Cataloged as Arp 273 (also as UGC 1810), these galaxies do
   look peculiar, but interacting galaxies are now understood to be common
   in the universe. Closer to home, the large spiral Andromeda Galaxy is
   known to be some 2 million light-years away and inexorably approaching
   the Milky Way. In fact the far away peculiar galaxies of Arp 273 may
   offer an analog of the far future encounter of Andromeda and Milky Way.
   Repeated galaxy encounters on a cosmic timescale ultimately result in a
   merger into a single galaxy of stars. From our perspective, the bright
   cores of the Arp 273 galaxies are separated by only a little over
   100,000 light-years.

                     Tomorrow's picture: pixels in space
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       Authors & editors: Robert Nemiroff (MTU) & Jerry Bonnell (UMCP)
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