IC 3900

IC 3900

IC 3900 is a lenticular galaxy in the constellation Coma Berenices about 330 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 92,000 ly, about the width of our Milky Way. It is receding from us at about 7,171 km/s.

Illustration from its catalogued shape, not a photograph

Lenticular
type · S0
330 million ly
from Earth · from redshift
92k ly
across
14.8
apparent magnitude
7,171 km/s
receding (RC3)

Because its light is 330 million ly from home, you are seeing IC 3900 as it looked roughly 330 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
NGC 4821Elliptical2.9 million ly
apart
IC 832Elliptical5.2 million ly
apart
NGC 4807Elliptical5.5 million ly
apart
NGC 4859Lenticular5.8 million ly
apart
IC 3959Elliptical6.0 million ly
apart
NGC 4848Spiral7.1 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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