The NGC 507 group, together with
the NGC 383 group (sometimes called the Pisces Cloud) located three degrees to the west, anchors the southern end of the Perseus-Pisces supercluster, a vast group of galaxies stretching 40 degrees across the northern autumn sky. The supercluster is located about 250 million light years away, across the Taurus Void from our local supercluster (Virgo or Laniakea), and has its northern terminus in
the Perseus galaxy cluster (Abell 426). All of the 40 or so brighter galaxies in the image have redshifts of between about 0.015 and 0.020, implying that they’re all members of this group.
NGC 507 itself was discovered to have faint concentric shells by Halton Arp, who listed it as Arp 299 in his catalogue of peculiar galaxies. These shells are now thought to be the product of ancient mergers. NGC 507 is also an AGN and seems to have radio lobes associated with it. The group of galaxies surrounding NGC 499 may be merging with the main body of the NGC 507 group.
Several other interesting galaxies surround the main body of the cluster, including the ring galaxies NGC 483 and its smaller neighbor IC 1679:
and the two odd bits of blue debris cataloged as IC 1677:
and AGC 114563, a radio source:
At the edges of the image, we find the
highly disturbed spiral NGC 523, which was also listed in Arp’s catalog as Arp 158:
the polar galaxy IC 1689:
and the dusty spiral PGC 4879, with its warped dust lane:
All of the main galaxies in the NGC 507 group were discovered by William Herschel in 1784.
Comments