My pareidolia hits me hard whenever I see the "face" of M86, M84, NGC 4388, NGC 4402 and NGC 4387 (that's the "nose" galaxy)!
But what I find even more fascinating is the fact that huge elliptical galaxy M86 is stealing gas from nearby battered spiral NGC 4438 (one of the "Eyes" galaxies, the one with a bluish disk).
The image above is from
A Spectacular H$\alpha$ Complex in Virgo: Evidence for a Collision Between M86 and NGC 4438 and Implications for Collisional ISM Heating of Ellipticals by Jeffrey D. P. Kenney et al. Go
here to read about it.
And I may as well use up all my three attachments:
The above image was taken by Patrick Dufour. This is what he wrote about his picture:
Patrick Dufour wrote:
During a search to learn more about this Virgo galaxy cluster, I came across a research that highlighted the collision of the giant galaxy M86 and its neighbor NGC 4438 (http: //
www.astro. yale.edu/kenney/pages/projects.html). On the majority of images taken in color by amateurs, we cannot see this interaction other than by acquiring images in the H-Alpha band. That said, the signal is so weak that even 30-minute exposures barely make a noticeable difference. But clearly, large professional telescopes are able to get this information and I challenged myself to take as many exposures as necessary to bring out the phenomenon. Here is after almost 30 hours of exposures only in H-Alpha spread over a long period given a short presence in the sky of Chile since the month of May.
Let's finish with another APOD, this one by Mark Hanson from
August 14, 2018:
Nice, isn't it?
But according to the caption, the red bridge of gas between NGC 4438 and M86 may just be foreground high-altitude galactic cirrus in our galaxy! But honestly, isn't that too much of a coincidence that a bridge of gas connecting a spiral galaxy and a faintly red-glowing elliptical galaxy would be just foreground cirrus, completely unconnected to the galactic spectacle millions of light-years behind it?
Ann