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Some astronomers nickname it the "Eye of Sauron" from its appearance.
NGC 4151 is a member of a group of 9 galaxies known as the NGC 4151 Group. The NGC 4151 Group is part of the Ursa Major Cloud, which is part of the Virgo Supercluster.
Supernova
One supernova has been observed in NGC 4151: SN 2018aoq (Type II-P, mag 15.3) was discovered by the Lick Observatory Supernova Search (LOSS) on 1 April 2018.
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X-ray source
X-ray emission from NGC 4151 was apparently first detected on December 24, 1970, with the X-ray observatory satellite Uhuru, although the observation spanned an error-box of 0.56 square degrees and there is some controversy as to whether UHURU might not have detected the BL Lac object 1E 1207.9 +3945, which is inside their error box – the later HEAO 1 detected an X-ray source of NGC 4151 at 1H 1210+393, coincident with the optical position of the nucleus and outside the error box of Uhuru.
To explain the X-ray emission two different possibilities have been proposed:
- radiation of material falling onto the central black hole (which was growing much more quickly about 25,000 years ago) was so bright that it stripped electrons away from the atoms in the gas in its path, and then electrons recombined with these ionized atoms
- the energy released by material flowing into the black hole in an accretion disk created a vigorous outflow of gas from the surface of the disk, which directly heated gas in its path to X-ray emitting temperatures