NGC 3876

NGC 3876

NGC 3876 is a spiral galaxy in the constellation Virgo about 133 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 43,000 ly, about 43% of our Milky Way's width. The light reaching us tonight left it about 133 million years ago.

Illustration from its catalogued shape, not a photograph

Spiral
type · Sab
133 million ly
from Earth · from redshift
43k ly
across
13.8
apparent magnitude

Because its light is 133 million ly from home, you are seeing NGC 3876 as it looked roughly 133 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 3869Spiral7.7 million ly
apart
NGC 3976Barred spiral11 million ly
apart
NGC 3872Elliptical18 million ly
apart
IC 735Barred spiral18 million ly
apart
NGC 3731Elliptical19 million ly
apart
NGC 4191Lenticular19 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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