NGC 1277

NGC 1277 is a lenticular galaxy in the constellation of Perseus. It is a member of the Perseus Cluster of galaxies and is located approximately 220 million light years from the Milky Way. It has a visual magnitude of 14.7. It was discovered on December 4, 1875 by Lawrence Parsons, 4th Earl of Rosse.

Ancient stars

NGC 1277 has been called a "relic of the early universe" because its stars formed during a roughly 100 million year interval 12 billion years ago, when the universe was only about 2 billion years old. After this burst of star formation, a thousand times the rate of star formation in our own Milky Way galaxy, this generation process shut off, leaving NGC 1277 populated with metal-rich stars about 7 billion years older than our Sun.^[2][3]

Supermassive black hole

Two studies have been published concerning the possible presence of a supermassive black hole at the center of this galaxy.^{[4] [5]}

According to one group,^[4] who made observations using the Hobby-Eberly Telescope at Texas's McDonald Observatory, the motions of the stars near the center of this galaxy imply the presence of a black hole with a mass of about 17 billion solar masses, equivalent to 14% of the total stellar mass of the galaxy. This would make the black hole in NGC 1277 one of the largest known, in relation to the mass of its host galaxy.

A second study,^[5] based on the same data and published the following year, reached a very different conclusion: the black hole is not particularly overmassive, estimated at between 2 and 5 billion solar masses with 5 billion being the most likely value. This represents less than a third of its previously estimated mass and indeed models with no black hole at all were found to provide reasonably good fits to the data, including the central region.

References