NGC 4703

NGC 4703

NGC 4703 is a barred spiral galaxy in the constellation Virgo about 205 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 100,000 ly, about the width of our Milky Way. The light reaching us tonight left it about 205 million years ago.

Illustration from its catalogued shape, not a photograph

Barred spiral
type · Sb
205 million ly
from Earth · from redshift
101k ly
across
13.6
apparent magnitude

Because its light is 205 million ly from home, you are seeing NGC 4703 as it looked roughly 205 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 4778Lenticular3.4 million ly
apart
NGC 4761Spiral3.5 million ly
apart
NGC 4780AGalaxy4.5 million ly
apart
NGC 4716Lenticular7.0 million ly
apart
IC 3859Spiral7.3 million ly
apart
NGC 4764Elliptical12 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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