NGC 3118

NGC 3118

NGC 3118 is a barred spiral galaxy in the constellation Leo Minor about 62 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 38,000 ly, about 38% of our Milky Way's width. The light reaching us tonight left it about 62 million years ago.

Illustration from its catalogued shape, not a photograph

Barred spiral
type · Sbc
62 million ly
from Earth · from redshift
38k ly
across
14.3
apparent magnitude

Because its light is 62 million ly from home, you are seeing NGC 3118 as it looked roughly 62 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 2964Barred spiral5.8 million ly
apart
IC 2524Lenticular6.5 million ly
apart
NGC 3254Barred spiral6.6 million ly
apart
NGC 3067Spiral6.7 million ly
apart
NGC 3245ABarred spiral6.8 million ly
apart
NGC 3245Lenticular6.8 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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