NGC 142

NGC 142

NGC 142 is a barred spiral galaxy in the constellation Cetus about 374 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 110,000 ly, about the width of our Milky Way. The light reaching us tonight left it about 374 million years ago.

Illustration from its catalogued shape, not a photograph

Barred spiral
type · SBb
374 million ly
from Earth · from redshift
106k ly
across
14.6
apparent magnitude

Because its light is 374 million ly from home, you are seeing NGC 142 as it looked roughly 374 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 143Barred spiral560,000 ly
apart
NGC 144Spiral4.5 million ly
apart
NGC 66Barred spiral27 million ly
apart
NGC 65Elliptical37 million ly
apart
NGC 73Spiral52 million ly
apart
NGC 7807Barred spiral55 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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