The gossamer-thin twisted inner dust lane of NGC 4753 looks very interesting. I have previously called its appearance woven, and the APOD Robot compares it to a bread box.
In order to better understand what is going on inside NGC 4753, we need to see more of the galaxy. Here is a
beautiful picture of it by Gmadkat:
This is the overall shape that I can see in NGC 4753:
NGC 4753 gmadkat annotated.png
It definitely looks as if NGC 4753 is a disk galaxy (and it is, surprise).
This is what the dust lanes look like to me:
NGC 4753 gmadkat annotated 2.png
You can see that there are two main dust features in this galaxy. One stretches horizontally for a good distance across the galaxy, and if you look carefully, it seems to suddenly "bend back" and turn back towards the center.
To me, this looks like the remnant of a long galactic bar, at least slightly similar to the long bar in NGC 1300:
The "woven bread basket" that is the topic of today's APOD could be the remnant of an inner ring in NGC 4753. Long ago, it may have resembled the inner ring of NGC 1097:
Clearly, the dust lanes of NGC 4753 are twisted, but it does look to me as if the dust lanes have something to do with a galactic bar and an inner ring of a barred galaxy. Obviously NGC 4753 is a very "red and dead" galaxy, where star formation has ended long ago, all massive stars have died and all open star clusters have evaporated. Almost all gas and dust has also disappeared, so it does look a bit weird that the central thin dust lanes are so crisp.
In my opinion, NGC 4753 is very similar to NGC 1316:
You can see that NGC 1316 has a short "bar of dust" stretching across the small bright core, and a "semi-circle" of dust outlining an inner ring. There is clearly a disk with a faint spiral structure and faint, large, disheveled outer spiral arms.
The main obvious difference between NGC 4753 and NGC 1316 appears to be that NGC 1316 is interacting with a satellite galaxy, while NGC 4753 is not. On the other hand, it seems unlikely to me that NGC 1317 is responsible for the "messed-up" appearance of NGC 1316, in view of the fact that NGC 1317 itself is so crisp and regular.
So my amateur guess is that both NGC 4753 and NGC 1316 have undergone previous mergers, each with a smallish galaxy. Their mergers have roughed them up, without wreaking total havoc within them.
That's what I would guess anyway!
Ann
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The Twisted Disk of NGC 4753
