NGC 3789

NGC 3789

NGC 3789 is a lenticular galaxy in the constellation Crater about 258 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 258 million years ago.

Illustration from its catalogued shape, not a photograph

Lenticular
type · S0-a
258 million ly
from Earth · from redshift
135k ly
across
14.3
apparent magnitude

Because its light is 258 million ly from home, you are seeing NGC 3789 as it looked roughly 258 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 3791Lenticular2.5 million ly
apart
NGC 3730Lenticular4.6 million ly
apart
NGC 3854Spiral11 million ly
apart
NGC 3696Spiral14 million ly
apart
NGC 3858Barred spiral14 million ly
apart
NGC 3707Elliptical16 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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