NGC 3879

NGC 3879

NGC 3879 is a spiral galaxy in the constellation Draco about 65 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 39,000 ly, about 39% of our Milky Way's width. The light reaching us tonight left it about 65 million years ago.

Illustration from its catalogued shape, not a photograph

Spiral
type · Sd
65 million ly
from Earth · from redshift
39k ly
across
13.4
apparent magnitude

Because its light is 65 million ly from home, you are seeing NGC 3879 as it looked roughly 65 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 3622Spiral5.2 million ly
apart
NGC 4125Elliptical5.8 million ly
apart
NGC 4221Lenticular6.0 million ly
apart
NGC 4081Spiral6.8 million ly
apart
NGC 4363Barred spiral7.3 million ly
apart
NGC 4391Elliptical7.3 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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