IC 5049B

IC 5049B is an elliptical galaxy in the constellation Microscopium about 573 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 300,000 ly, about 3.0 times the width of our Milky Way. The light reaching us tonight left it about 573 million years ago.

Because its light is 573 million ly from home, you are seeing IC 5049B as it looked roughly 573 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.

Source: structural data (position, morphology, brightness, redshift) from OpenNGC (CC BY-SA). Distance computed by gravityfinder from redshift via Hubble's law (H0 = 70 km/s/Mpc).