NGC 4520

NGC 4520

NGC 4520 is an elliptical galaxy in the constellation Virgo about 360 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 83,000 ly, about 83% of our Milky Way's width. The light reaching us tonight left it about 360 million years ago.

Illustration from its catalogued shape, not a photograph

Elliptical
type · E-S0
360 million ly
from Earth · from redshift
83k ly
across
14.7
apparent magnitude

Because its light is 360 million ly from home, you are seeing NGC 4520 as it looked roughly 360 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 4422Elliptical15 million ly
apart
NGC 4285Spiral34 million ly
apart
NGC 4726Galaxy50 million ly
apart
NGC 4727Barred spiral51 million ly
apart
IC 855Galaxy60 million ly
apart
NGC 4493Elliptical61 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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