NGC 4918

NGC 4918

NGC 4918 is a lenticular galaxy in the constellation Virgo about 466 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 120,000 ly, about the width of our Milky Way. The light reaching us tonight left it about 466 million years ago.

Illustration from its catalogued shape, not a photograph

Lenticular
type · S0-a
466 million ly
from Earth · from redshift
121k ly
across
15.1
apparent magnitude

Because its light is 466 million ly from home, you are seeing NGC 4918 as it looked roughly 466 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 5192Spiral75 million ly
apart
IC 774Lenticular94 million ly
apart
NGC 5013Barred spiral100 million ly
apart
IC 855Galaxy110 million ly
apart
NGC 5331 NED02Barred spiral110 million ly
apart
NGC 5100 NED01Barred spiral120 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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