Picture of the day

Arp 273 is a group of interacting galaxies, lying 300 million light years away in the constellation Andromeda and first discovered in 1966. In this photograph from the Hubble Space Telescope, the larger of the spiral galaxies, known as UGC 1810, has a disk that is tidally distorted into a rose-like shape by the gravitational tidal pull of the companion galaxy below it, known as UGC 1813. A swath of blue jewels across the top is the combined light from clusters of intensely bright and hot young blue stars.Photograph: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team