IC 3203

IC 3203

IC 3203 is a barred spiral galaxy in the constellation Coma Berenices about 322 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 120,000 ly, about the width of our Milky Way. The light reaching us tonight left it about 322 million years ago.

Illustration from its catalogued shape, not a photograph

Barred spiral
type · Sb
322 million ly
from Earth · from redshift
123k ly
across
15.4
apparent magnitude

Because its light is 322 million ly from home, you are seeing IC 3203 as it looked roughly 322 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 3171Elliptical3.4 million ly
apart
IC 3154Elliptical4.6 million ly
apart
IC 3122Barred spiral5.9 million ly
apart
IC 3144Barred spiral6.5 million ly
apart
IC 3116Spiral7.0 million ly
apart
IC 3184Barred spiral7.3 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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