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NGC 660 NGC 660 is a rare type of galaxy called a polar ring galaxy. How rare are they? We’ve only discovered about a dozen of them to date, and we’ve taken a single image containing roughly 10,000 galaxies. These galaxies have rings, stars, dust, debris, and other galaxy stuff in an orbit almost perpendicular to the galaxy’s disk plain. Where’d this material come from? It was most likely siphoned from a galaxy that passed nearby long ago, proving once and for all that the universe operates just like the Road Warrior. The ring is farther across than the galactic disk, and astronomers are observing it closely to watch how dark matter’s gravitational pull affects the disk in an effort to learn more about dark matter itself. |