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Minor mergers are thought to be important for the build-up and structuralevolution of massive elliptical galaxies. In this work, we report the discoveryof a system of four shell features in NGC 4889, one of the brightest members ofthe Coma cluster, using optical images taken with the Hubble Space Telescopeand the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. The shells are well aligned with the majoraxis of the host and are likely to have been formed by the accretion of a smallsatellite galaxy. We have performed a detailed two-dimensional photometricdecomposition of NGC 4889 and of the many overlapping nearby galaxies in itsvicinity. This comprehensive model allows us not only to firmly detect thelow-surface brightness shells, but, crucially, also to accurately measure theirluminosities and colors. The shells are bluer than the underlying stars at thesame radius in the main galaxy. We make use of the colors of the shells and thecolor-magnitude relation of the Coma cluster to infer the luminosity (or mass)of the progenitor galaxy. The shells in NGC 4889 appear to have been producedby the minor merger of a moderate-luminosity (M_I ~ -18.7 mag) disk (S0 orspiral) galaxy with a luminosity (mass) ratio of ~ 90:1 with respect to theprimary galaxy. The novel methodology presented in this work can be exploitedto decode the fossil record imprinted in the photometric substructure of othernearby early-type galaxies.

A Novel Approach to Constrain the Mass Ratio of Minor Mergers in Elliptical Galaxies: Application to NGC 4889, the Brightest Cluster Galaxy in Coma