Friday, Jan 3, 2025

NGC 474 is a giant island of stars, not smooth and uniform like a ball, but wrapped in concentric waves of starlight, like ripples on a cosmic pond. These "waves", called shells, are the remains of ancient galactic collisions, evidence of cosmic encounters that occurred billions of years ago. NGC 474 is like a galactic fossil, telling us a story of mergers and interactions that shaped its current shape. One theory suggests that NGC 474 "cannibalized" smaller dwarf galaxies, whose stellar remnants now form the shells. Another hypothesis is that it underwent a merger with a spiral galaxy, whose disk was destroyed, leaving only stars to form the shells. NGC 474 is located about 100 million light-years from Earth. It has a diameter of about 250,000 light-years, making it significantly larger than our own Milky Way. The data were acquired by Vikas Chander with his Planewave CDK-24, Moravian C5A-100 mono camera, Planewave L-600 mount located at Obstech, Chile. The processing was done by Aldo Zanetti with Pixinsight