NGC 240

NGC 240

NGC 240 is a lenticular galaxy in the constellation Pisces about 570 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 220,000 ly, about 2.2 times the width of our Milky Way. The light reaching us tonight left it about 570 million years ago.

Illustration from its catalogued shape, not a photograph

Lenticular
type · S0-a
570 million ly
from Earth · from redshift
224k ly
across
14.7
apparent magnitude

Because its light is 570 million ly from home, you are seeing NGC 240 as it looked roughly 570 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 1568Lenticular15 million ly
apart
IC 1566Elliptical15 million ly
apart
NGC 190 NED01Spiral20 million ly
apart
NGC 190 NED02Elliptical31 million ly
apart
IC 1569Lenticular34 million ly
apart
IC 1565Elliptical37 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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