NGC 1239

NGC 1239

NGC 1239 is a lenticular galaxy in the constellation Eridanus about 402 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 140,000 ly, about the width of our Milky Way. The light reaching us tonight left it about 402 million years ago.

Illustration from its catalogued shape, not a photograph

Lenticular
type · S0
402 million ly
from Earth · from redshift
144k ly
across
14.6
apparent magnitude

Because its light is 402 million ly from home, you are seeing NGC 1239 as it looked roughly 402 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 1287Spiral14 million ly
apart
NGC 1221Lenticular14 million ly
apart
IC 1886Lenticular15 million ly
apart
NGC 1223Elliptical16 million ly
apart
NGC 1225Barred spiral26 million ly
apart
IC 283Spiral26 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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