When looking at an image like this I do have to wonder: Are there any beings like us on one of the likely hundreds of trillions of planets in these galaxies? Are they looking up at the sky like us and wondering if anyone is out there?
Markarian's Chain is a stretch of galaxies that forms part of the
Virgo Cluster. When viewed from Earth, the galaxies lie along a smoothly curved line.
Charles Messier first discovered two of the galaxies,
M84 and
M86, in 1781. The other galaxies seen in the chain were discovered by
William Herschel and are now known primarily by their catalog numbers in
John Louis Emil Dreyer's
New General Catalogue, published in 1888. It was ultimately named after the
Armenian astrophysicist,
Benjamin Markarian, who discovered their common motion in the early 1960s. Near the center there appear the pair of interacting galaxies NGC 4438 and NGC 4435, about 50 million light-years away, known to some as
Markarian's Eyes. (Source: Wikipedia)
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