NGC 3621

NGC 3621 is a spiral galaxy about 22 million light-years away. It is comparatively bright and has a flat pancake shape, indicating that it hasn’t yet come face to face with another galaxy as such a galactic collision would have disturbed the thin disc of stars, creating a small bulge in its center.

This galaxy is of further interest to astronomers because its relative proximity allows them to study a wide range of astronomical objects within it, including stellar nurseries, dust clouds, and pulsating stars called Cepheid variables, which astronomers use as distance markers in the Universe.