Скачать или смотреть 🌌NGC 4676A&4676B - The Mice Galaxies

🌌 The Mice Galaxies — A Pair of Spiraling Giants in Collision 🐭✨
The Mice Galaxies (NGC 4676A and NGC 4676B) are a spectacular pair of interacting spiral galaxies located about 290 million light-years away in the constellation Coma Berenices. Their long, thin tidal tails resemble the tails of mice, giving them their nickname. They are currently in the midst of a galactic collision, offering astronomers a vivid snapshot of how galaxies merge and evolve.

🔭 Quick Facts:
📍 Type: Interacting spiral galaxies
🌌 Distance: ~290 million light-years from Earth
📏 Size: Each galaxy is roughly the size of the Milky Way (~100,000 light-years across)
💡 Apparent Magnitude: ~13 — visible only with large telescopes
🌠 Location: Constellation Coma Berenices
🧭 Other Names: NGC 4676, Arp 242, PGC 43077/43078

💥 Why They’re Fascinating:
The galaxies are in the early stages of merging, with their disks overlapping and tidal forces pulling out long streams of stars and gas.
Their “tails” of stars and dust stretch tens of thousands of light-years into space, resembling the whiskers or tails of mice.
Over the next billion years, the two galaxies will likely merge into a single massive elliptical galaxy.
The collision has triggered bursts of star formation, visible as bright blue regions along the tidal tails.
The Mice Galaxies are part of the Coma Cluster, a dense region of galaxies where interactions and mergers are common.
They were included in Halton Arp’s Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies (Arp 242) due to their unusual and dramatic shape.

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