Celestial hemisphere:  Northern  ·  Constellation: Leo (Leo)  ·  Contains:  Leo Triplet  ·  M 66  ·  NGC 3627
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Messier 66 — NGC 3627, Mario Wunderlich
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Messier 66 — NGC 3627

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Messier 66 — NGC 3627, Mario Wunderlich
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Messier 66 — NGC 3627

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Description

This is NGC 3627, also known as Messier 66, one of the galaxies in the Leo Triplet.

When galaxies collide, their titanic gravitational influence chaotically disrupts each other's orderly and symmetric shapes. Their collision plays out over billions of years, as the hundreds of billions or even trillions of stars, and gargantuan amounts of gas and dust settle into their new disrupted orbits.

Billions of years ago, Messier 66 collided with another of the Leo Triplet galaxies, NGC 3628, causing the spiral arms to be pulled out, disfigured, and stretched as we see them here.

This galaxy is around 30 million light-years away, so this is how it looked like 30 million years ago. To put it into perspective, this is around the time when small mammals were still evolving several million years after the extinction event that wiped out the dinosaurs at the end of the Cretaceous era.

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