Credit score rating: Digitized Sky Survey – STScI/NASA, Colored & Healpixed by CDS
This distant ring of galaxies is the 388th entry in amount 8 of the Catalogue of Galaxies and of Clusters of Galaxies compiled by Swiss astronomer Fritz Zwicky. As such, it’s often called VIII ZW 388. Nevertheless astronomers (notably amateurs) often search recommendation from it as Zwicky’s Necklace.
The brightest member of this group (the galaxy throughout the “take care of” of the necklace) is LEDA 3110345. It glows at magnitude 14.9. The following brightest galaxy, barely beneath LEDA 3110345 on this image, is LEDA 1142006, which glows barely fainter at magnitude 15.9. The faintest member of the Necklace seen on this image, LEDA 4540064, scrapes the underside of the size at magnitude 19.1. That’s virtually 175,000 cases fainter than the everyday human eye can see at night time time. Possibly an newbie telescope with a 40-inch mirror could reveal the faintest one. If you’ve obtained such an instrument, you’ll uncover Zwicky’s Necklace a bit higher than 31/2° southeast of magnitude 4.3 Tau (τ) Virginis.
This object was discovered higher than 4 a very long time prior to now, nonetheless little is known about it. It contains at least 10 galaxies organized in a hoop (or necklace). The oldest image of it was taken in 1955 by the first Palomar Observatory Sky Survey. The NASA/IPAC Extragalactic Database, often a font of priceless knowledge, contains nearly nothing about it.
Zwicky’s description, revealed in a 1975 paper he wrote with Wallace L. W. Sargent and Charles T. Kowal, reads: “4 crimson spherical (stellar or fluffy) compacts surrounded by seven additional compacts inside circle of seven minutes of arc. Explicit individual magnitudes from 16.8 to 19.3.”
Based on the redshift of the group, Zwicky’s Necklace perhaps lies some 2 billion light-years away.