NGC 4403

NGC 4403

NGC 4403 is a barred spiral galaxy in the constellation Virgo about 242 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 110,000 ly, about the width of our Milky Way. The light reaching us tonight left it about 242 million years ago.

Illustration from its catalogued shape, not a photograph

Barred spiral
type · SBab
242 million ly
from Earth · from redshift
111k ly
across
13.5
apparent magnitude

Because its light is 242 million ly from home, you are seeing NGC 4403 as it looked roughly 242 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 4404Elliptical14 million ly
apart
NGC 4484Spiral18 million ly
apart
IC 784Spiral19 million ly
apart
NGC 4201Lenticular22 million ly
apart
NGC 4225Lenticular22 million ly
apart
NGC 4176Barred spiral26 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).

← all galaxies