The Gemini Observatory shows us a strange asymmetrical galaxy

The overdeveloped spiral arm of a galaxy dominates the foreground of a stunning new image from the Gemini Observatory in Hawaii. The image captures a lopsided spiral galaxy known as NGC 772, which is over 100 million light-years from Earth in the constellation of Aries. The photograph was taken by the Gemini North telescope, located near the summit of Mauna Kea in Hawaii and operated by the National Science Foundation's National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory (NOIRLab).

One of the galaxy's spiral arms appears very large, due to tidal interactions with its "unruly" neighbor, a dwarf elliptical galaxy called NGC 770. These tidal interactions, caused by differences in the gravitational field strength of the objects, have distorted and elongated one of the arms spiral of NGC 772, giving the galaxy a lopsided appearance, according to a statement from the NOIRLab.



Credits: Gemini / AURA
Due to the unusual appearance of NGC 772, the galaxy was included in the Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies, which is a 1966 collection by astronomer Halton Arp capturing 338 weird and wonderful galaxies that populate the universe. The galaxies in this catalog boast strange structures, such as tidal tails, rings, jets, detached segments, or other idiosyncrasies. In addition to NGC 772's pumped arm, the new image captures a number of galaxies lurking in the background. NOIRLab shared the new image on March 22.

"The bright spots and the spots they scatter are distant galaxies, some of the closest examples can be resolved into characteristic spiral shapes," wrote NOIRLab staff in the declaration. "Every direction in the sky towards which astronomers have pointed telescopes contains a rich carpet of galaxies, with an estimated 2 trillion galaxies in total in our observable universe."