NGC 4874 is a supergiant elliptical galaxy in the constellation of Coma Berenices. It was discovered on 11 April 1785 by German-British astronomer William Herschel, who catalogued it as a bright patch of nebulous feature. The second-brightest galaxy within the northern Coma Cluster, it is located at a distance of about 97 megaparsecs (316,000,000 light-years) from Earth.
Characteristics
The galaxy is surrounded by an immense stellar halo that extends up to around ten times the size of the Milky Way Galaxy, somewhere roughly one million light-years in diameter. It is also enveloped by a huge cloud of interstellar medium that is currently being heated by the action of infalling material from its central supermassive black hole. A jet of highly energetic plasma extends out to 1,700 light-years from its center. The galaxy has more than 30,000 globular clusters.
Supernovae
Three supernovae have been observed in NGC 4874:
- SN 1968B (type unknown, mag. 17.4) was discovered by Fritz Zwicky on 3 February 1968.
- SN 1981G (Type Ia, mag. 15) was discovered by Miklós Lovas on 2 June 1981.
- SN 2025ilo (Type Ib, mag. 20.6) was discovered by A. Horti-David, K. Sarneczky, and J. Vinko on 26 April 2025.
