NGC 1609

NGC 1609

NGC 1609 is a lenticular galaxy in the constellation Eridanus about 201 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 72,000 ly, about 72% of our Milky Way's width. The light reaching us tonight left it about 201 million years ago.

Illustration from its catalogued shape, not a photograph

Lenticular
type · S0-a
201 million ly
from Earth · from redshift
72k ly
across
14.7
apparent magnitude

Because its light is 201 million ly from home, you are seeing NGC 1609 as it looked roughly 201 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 1611Lenticular1.3 million ly
apart
NGC 1607Lenticular3.7 million ly
apart
IC 372Lenticular4.9 million ly
apart
NGC 1580Barred spiral4.9 million ly
apart
NGC 1594Barred spiral5.7 million ly
apart
NGC 1604Lenticular8.0 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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