NGC 2397B

NGC 2397B

NGC 2397B is an irregular galaxy in the constellation Volans about 65 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 23,000 ly, about 23% of our Milky Way's width. The light reaching us tonight left it about 65 million years ago.

Illustration from its catalogued shape, not a photograph

Irregular
type · IB
65 million ly
from Earth · from redshift
23k ly
across
15.0
apparent magnitude

Because its light is 65 million ly from home, you are seeing NGC 2397B as it looked roughly 65 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 2397Barred spiral940,000 ly
apart
NGC 2434Elliptical1.5 million ly
apart
NGC 2442Barred spiral3.2 million ly
apart
NGC 2788BBarred spiral11 million ly
apart
NGC 1809Spiral14 million ly
apart
NGC 1892Spiral14 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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