NGC 1232 floats in space like an ΓÇ£island universe.ΓÇ¥ Viewed through eighteenth-century telescopes, galaxies like this were little more than fuzzy objects in the sky and were the subject of much discussion: were they stellar systems comparable to the Milky Way (then known only as a band of stars across the sky)? This hypothesis, first proposed by Thomas Wright and Immanuel Kant, was known as the ΓÇ£island-universe hypothesis.ΓÇ¥ Today we know that spiral galaxies, a common sight in our universe, are indeed island universes. The Milky Way, also a type ΓÇ£cΓÇ¥ spiral, is thought to look much like NGC 1232.
