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.

                                2021 March 29

                          M64: The Evil Eye Galaxy
   Image Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA & the PHANGS-HST Team; Acknowledgement:
                                Judy Schmidt

   Explanation: Who knows what evil lurks in the eyes of galaxies? The
   Hubble knows -- or in the case of spiral galaxy M64 -- is helping to
   find out. Messier 64, also known as the Evil Eye or Sleeping Beauty
   Galaxy, may seem to have evil in its eye because all of its stars
   rotate in the same direction as the interstellar gas in the galaxy's
   central region, but in the opposite direction in the outer regions.
   Captured here in great detail by the Earth-orbiting Hubble Space
   Telescope, enormous dust clouds obscure the near-side of M64's central
   region, which are laced with the telltale reddish glow of hydrogen
   associated with star formation. M64 lies about 17 million light years
   away, meaning that the light we see from it today left when the last
   common ancestor between humans and chimpanzees roamed the Earth. The
   dusty eye and bizarre rotation are likely the result of a
   billion-year-old merger of two different galaxies.

                     Tomorrow's picture: sprite mountain
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       Authors & editors: Robert Nemiroff (MTU) & Jerry Bonnell (UMCP)
            NASA Official: Phillip Newman Specific rights apply.
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                             & Michigan Tech. U.
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