Physics Photo of the Week
Physics Photo of the Week April 4, 2025 Galaxy M106 - Photo by Donald Collins - College View Observatory Galaxy M106 - the 106th entry in Messier's famous catalog of deep sky objects - lies about 20-25 million light years from Earth. It is about 10 times further than the Andromeda Galaxy and about twice as far away as the recently featured Galaxy M87 . As with most galaxies, M106 contains on the order of 100 billion stars , and most likely has a supermassive black hole lurking deep in its core. Celestial south is up in this photo. This galaxy is interesting in that there are many star-forming regions within the spiral arms. It's also rather "clumpy". The clouds of dust and stars are not very evenly distributed. The clumps of new young stars are the clumps that appear brighter and "bluer" in the photo. The clumps of stars eventually will dissipate and result in open clusters similar to the Pleiades (Seven Sisters) star cluster in our own...