I'd say this is an April Fools joke. The photograph itself is a Hubble one allright, but I think the two objects are photoshopped on it. To me they suspiciously look like an image of the Helix-nebula with spiral arms attached. (the Helix nebula is a planetary nebula in our own galaxy). And I've never heard of a "King Galaxy" either.

I figure it's shopped. The first positive hit when googling "eye of god" galaxy gives this link:

http://www.jcracingteam.com/eye_of_god.htm

Check the picture, it's on Snopes somewhere as well. Real galaxy, duplicated and monkeyed about with.

It looks to me like either a binary RING galaxy or the same ring galaxy thats undergone gravitational lensing, or a photoshoped image.

Fake as all hell. Looks like somebody took either the Helix or Ring nebula, added two crappy spiral arms, cloned and flipped them. If I recall correctly that's a section of the Hubble Deep Field. The galaxies wouldn't look like exact clones of each other, and they would probably be merging by now unless the effect was only line of sight. While galaxies can have other, smaller galaxies that orbit them (our own galaxy has a few) they usually merge with other, larger galaxies or their gravitational interraction causes them to distort.

Also the "eye of God" is not a galaxy. It's a planetary nebula, the remains of a star after its been through its life. In fact the Helix Nebula (known as the Eye of God to some") is in our own galaxy!

It doesn't appear to be the same image of the object pasted onto the picture, with one copy of it flipped over. I magnified the picture a bit, isolated the two "king galaxies" and tried flipping them around various ways. They each seem to be quite distinct from each other.

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope webpage is at http://hubblesite.org/ if anybody with a faster computer than mine wants to sift through it (it takes me at least five minutes just to open a small image). I did searches on it, though, for "binary king galaxies", "binary ring galaxies", "binary king galaxy", "binary ring galaxy", "king galaxy", "ring galaxy", "deep-space photo EP_4277", "EP_4277", "EP-4277", and "EP4277" without finding that image.

No, I can assure you that it is faked.

Sorry not done yet:

Additionally, the designations commonly attached to deep space pictures are applied to the things in the image, not the picture itself. For example, NGC6020 would refer to an object in a picture, not the picture itself. I am not aware of the EP catalogue.

Also these galaxies, unless they were line of sight only (which means one is literally monsterous comparied to the other, and would more likely be an eliptical galaxy than a spiral galaxy) would be merging if they were really that close. In the image, their spiral arms aren't even slightly warped by the other's position. The structure looks wrong as well, I highly doubt it'd have such a large center and tiny little spiral arms like that, it should be distributed more in the spiral arms instead of this mass in the middle. It looks like some hideous hybrid between an eliptical and spiral galaxy.

For two galaxies to look almost EXACTLY the same is impossible. Additionally, the centers of the galaxies would NOT be blue, commonly ascioated with reflection nebulae. It would be VERY, VERY BRIGHT since this is is where the majority of stars eventually sit in galaxies as well as theoretical black holes.

If you take a look at how galaxies are thought to form, and view pictures of other non-bared spiral galaxies, you'll see this simply cannot occur.

It's a fake. I found the original on the Hubble website.

http://hubblesite.org/gallery/album/the_universe_collection/pr2004016c/

Brian

I can find Orion. :cheese:

Very good Maegan. Have a star. 😉

A google search for "binary king galaxy" gives 3 results, one of them is here. Google thinks "binary king" is wrong and suggests "binaryking galaxy" which gives no results!

Is Binary King any relation to Burger King?

Interesting thing.. have square eyes due to reading your write-ups for almost 8 hours straight at work (I'm highly motivated) You may have inadvertently answered your own question in regards to the term "binary king galaxy" in your article on the kitten born with eight legs. If you click on the link you provided:

http://www.messybeast.com/freak-conjoined.htm

about halfway down the page there is a blurb "Mistaken diagnosis of conjoined kittens". In the article it calls animals fused together "king" ie. "king rats" and "squirrel kings". Perhaps the term "Binary King Galaxy" is the hoaxsters way of saying the two galaxies are stuck together. Thanks for the entertainment.

Has anybody played with the brightness or contrast on this photo? When I view my LCD monitor at an angle, it looks like there might be something in the background. (Maybe just my imagination!) :roll:

Actualy the whole deep field is a nice fake from the NASA.

King Galaxy Mystery Solved on April Fool's Day

Rotate the image 90 degrees counter-clockwise and adjust the brightness and contrast so that the interstellar "dust" comes plainly into view.

EP 42 [19]77

There's your King!

Holy mackerel, Mark you're right!
I did what you said and here's what I got: