NGC 4567 Siamese Twins
![Picture](/uploads/7/5/0/9/75097535/editor/hubble-gives-unprecedented-view-of-supernovasn2020fqv.jpg?1635008394)
NGC 4567 (top) and NGC 4568 (bottom) nicknamed the Butterfly Galaxies or Siamese Twins are a set of unbarred spiral galaxies about 60 million light-years away in the constellation Virgo, close to M58. They were both discovered by William Herschel in 1784. They are part of the Virgo Cluster of galaxies. Strangely, Arp did not include this pair in his Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies. Only one supernova (SN 2004cc) was observed in the Butterfly Galaxies until March 31, 2020, when the Zwicky Transient Facility detected the rapidly rising supernova 2020fqv shown in the Hubble image to the right. The supernova intensity subsequently faded while capturing this picture's sub images from May thru July.
The galaxies were once suspected of being just a chance alignment because there was no evidence of distorted structure or tidal filaments, but more recent studies, especially in the infrared of neutral and molecular hydrogen, showed that they were indeed in the process of colliding, with the highest rate of star formation occurring in their overlap region.
The galaxies were once suspected of being just a chance alignment because there was no evidence of distorted structure or tidal filaments, but more recent studies, especially in the infrared of neutral and molecular hydrogen, showed that they were indeed in the process of colliding, with the highest rate of star formation occurring in their overlap region.
- Right Ascension: 12h 37m 34s, Declination: +11d 08m 45s
- Constellation: Virgo
- Distance: 59.4 Mly
- Apparent magnitude: NGC 4567 11.5, NGC 4568 10.9
- Apparent size: 3.1 x 2.2 arcmin
- Date: May thru July 2020
- Exposure: Lum: 24x400s=2.66h, Red: 15x400s=1.66h, Green: 15x400s=1.66h, Blue: 29x400=3.2h
- Instrument: RCOS 20 inch at f8.2 (fl=4116mm), SBIG ST8-XME (1 pixel=0.4509 arc-sec)
- Processing: PixInsight