NGC 4690

NGC 4690

NGC 4690 is an elliptical galaxy in the constellation Virgo about 130 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 61,000 ly, about 61% of our Milky Way's width. The light reaching us tonight left it about 130 million years ago.

Illustration from its catalogued shape, not a photograph

Elliptical
type · E-S0
130 million ly
from Earth · from redshift
61k ly
across
13.6
apparent magnitude

Because its light is 130 million ly from home, you are seeing NGC 4690 as it looked roughly 130 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 4653Spiral7.5 million ly
apart
NGC 4642Barred spiral7.5 million ly
apart
IC 804Lenticular11 million ly
apart
NGC 4799Spiral11 million ly
apart
NGC 4626Barred spiral13 million ly
apart
NGC 4628Barred spiral13 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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