NGC 7049

NGC 7049 - image from the Hubble Space Telescope's Advanced Camera for Surveys.

NGC 7049 is a galaxy that spans about 150 000 light-years and lies about 100 million light-years away from Earth in the inconspicuous southern constellation of Indus.

NGC 7049's unusual appearance is largely due to a prominent rope-like dust ring which stands out against the starlight behind it. These dust lanes are usually seen in young galaxies with active star-forming regions. NGC 7049 shows the features of both an elliptical galaxy and a spiral galaxy, and has relatively few globular clusters. ^[1] The bright star at the top of the ring is in our own Galaxy. Not visible is an unusual central polar ring of gas circling out of the plane near the galaxy's center. NGC 7049 is the brightest (BCG) of the Indus triplet of galaxies (NGC 7029, NGC 7041, NGC 7049), and its structure might have arisen from several recent galaxy collisions. Typical BCGs are some of the oldest and most massive galaxies. ^[2]

References

1. ^ The Astronomical League
2. ^ APOD

External links

Media related to NGC 7049 at Wikimedia Commons

• Simbad database