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 73 Mpc (megaparsecs) or 240 million light-years from the Milky Way. It has an apparent magnitude of about 14.7. It was discovered on December 4, 1875, by Lawrence Parsons, 4th Earl of Rosse. NGC 1277 has been called a "relic of the early universe" due to its stars being formed during a 100 million year interval about 12 billion years ago. Stars were formed at a rate of 1000 times that of the Milky Way galaxy's formation rate in a short burst of time. After this process of stellar formation ran its course, NGC 1277 was left populated with metal-rich stars that are about 7 billion years older than the Sun. NGC 1277 was the first galaxy confirmed as a relic galaxy — a nearby, passively evolved counterpart of the compact "red nugget" galaxies observed at redshift z ≈ 2 — and has since served as the archetype of this class. Observations with Hubble Space Telescope indicate that NGC 1277 lacks metal-poor globular clusters, suggesting that it has accreted little mass over its lifetime and supporting the relic galaxy hypothesis.