The most prominent is a large and bright galaxy, close to the center. According to Hubble's law for the expansion of the Universe, this places the cluster at a distance of about 500 million light-years. It is perhaps of a completely different, but still unknown, nature and may possibly interact with visible matter only via the force of gravity. These images are reproduced on a logarithmic intensity scale to better show the structure of these objects. At this scale, the individual pixels in the original frames are visible.
North is up and East left.
The cluster Abell 496 is noteworthy for its broad range of galaxy types, which include virtually all morphological sub-types known. They are similar to the Milky Way Galaxy in which we live. On time scales of millions to billions of years, this gas is then transformed into new stars. The astronomical magnitude scale indicates the brightness of celestial objects. For historical reasons, the faintest objects visible to the unaided eye in a dark sky have magnitude 6.