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Space photos of the week: A tale of two galaxies
LET’S SWITCH THE warp drive to light speed and head to deep space. The first stop is a satellite galaxy that orbits our Milky Way called the Large Magellanic Cloud, one of the most famous objects in the cosmos. Most galaxies have dwarf galaxies orbiting around them, just like moons orbit planets. Consisting of gas and newly forming stars, the LMC is only about 1/100th the size of our galaxy, but with 30 billion stars it’s certainly nothing to sneeze space dust at.
Next we’re traveling out 80 light years from Earth to a remarkable galaxy, called NGC 2655. It’s not a spiral like our Milky Way and it isn’t elliptical either; NGC 2655 is what’s called a lenticular galaxy. These are disc-like bodies that have lost most of their stellar mass, but retain a lot of the gas originally present during formation. What results is an amorphous shape formed by stars and wisps of interstellar gas. Though irregular, NGC 2655 and other lenticulars are still quite spectacular.
