Loading...

NGC 5195 is much smaller. It's a lenticellular dwarf galaxy which is about 15,000 light-years wide and roughly one-tenth the mass of the Whirlpool galaxy, but these two are gravitationally bound. You can see it like when you look at the images of these things. It's very obvious they're they're in a kind of a cosmic dance, you know, with each other. It's pretty wild. And researchers have studied these and they've determined that the little galaxy is influencing the shape of the Whirlpool, so pretty awesome. The tidal pull from the smaller galaxy is stirring up the larger one, triggering waves of star formation, gas streaming, and shock fronts that we can observe now in great detail.