NGC 3022

NGC 3022

NGC 3022 is a lenticular galaxy in the constellation Sextans about 291 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 291 million years ago.

Illustration from its catalogued shape, not a photograph

Lenticular
type · S0
291 million ly
from Earth · from redshift
144k ly
across
14.5
apparent magnitude

Because its light is 291 million ly from home, you are seeing NGC 3022 as it looked roughly 291 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 3014Barred spiral3.8 million ly
apart
IC 574Elliptical11 million ly
apart
NGC 3017Elliptical12 million ly
apart
NGC 3007Lenticular15 million ly
apart
IC 553Barred spiral18 million ly
apart
NGC 3093Elliptical19 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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