IC 5271

IC 5271

IC 5271 is a barred spiral galaxy in the constellation Piscis Austrinus about 80 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 70,000 ly, about 70% of our Milky Way's width. It is receding from us at about 1,735 km/s.

Illustration from its catalogued shape, not a photograph

Barred spiral
type · Sb
80 million ly
from Earth · from redshift
70k ly
across
11.5
apparent magnitude
1,735 km/s
receding (RC3)

Because its light is 80 million ly from home, you are seeing IC 5271 as it looked roughly 80 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 1459Elliptical5.5 million ly
apart
NGC 7421Barred spiral6.6 million ly
apart
NGC 7410Barred spiral8.4 million ly
apart
NGC 7507Elliptical10 million ly
apart
NGC 7513Barred spiral11 million ly
apart
NGC 7404Elliptical11 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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