NGC 47

NGC 47

NGC 47 is a barred spiral galaxy in the constellation Cetus about 269 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 269 million years ago.

Illustration from its catalogued shape, not a photograph

Barred spiral
type · SBbc
269 million ly
from Earth · from redshift
106k ly
across
13.5
apparent magnitude

Because its light is 269 million ly from home, you are seeing NGC 47 as it looked roughly 269 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 50Elliptical13 million ly
apart
NGC 54Barred spiral22 million ly
apart
NGC 106Spiral23 million ly
apart
IC 1490Spiral24 million ly
apart
IC 22Lenticular25 million ly
apart
NGC 17Lenticular26 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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