IC 1020

IC 1020

IC 1020 is a lenticular galaxy in the constellation Boötes about 200 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 62,000 ly, about 62% of our Milky Way's width. The light reaching us tonight left it about 200 million years ago.

Illustration from its catalogued shape, not a photograph

Lenticular
type · S0
200 million ly
from Earth · from redshift
62k ly
across
14.9
apparent magnitude

Because its light is 200 million ly from home, you are seeing IC 1020 as it looked roughly 200 million years ago. The photons left before that much of history had passed, and are only now reaching us. This distance is estimated from the galaxy's redshift, so the lookback time is approximate.

Nearest galaxies
IC 1017Lenticular4.7 million ly
apart
NGC 5635Barred spiral4.9 million ly
apart
IC 4452Spiral5.8 million ly
apart
NGC 5659Barred spiral9.2 million ly
apart
NGC 5641Spiral9.8 million ly
apart
IC 4397Barred spiral10 million ly
apart
Worlds in the same direction on the sky

Source: structural data (position, morphology, brightness, redshift) from OpenNGC (CC BY-SA). Recession velocity from RC3 (de Vaucouleurs et al. 1991, via NASA/HEASARC, public domain). Distance computed by gravityfinder from redshift via Hubble's law (H0 = 70 km/s/Mpc).

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