NGC 5516

NGC 5516

NGC 5516 is an elliptical galaxy in the constellation Centaurus about 208 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 140,000 ly, about the width of our Milky Way. It is receding from us at about 4,460 km/s.

Illustration from its catalogued shape, not a photograph

Elliptical
type · E-S0
208 million ly
from Earth · from redshift
145k ly
across
12.0
apparent magnitude
4,460 km/s
receding (RC3)

Because its light is 208 million ly from home, you are seeing NGC 5516 as it looked roughly 208 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
IC 4445Spiral17 million ly
apart
IC 4359Spiral18 million ly
apart
IC 4311Barred spiral29 million ly
apart
IC 4518BSpiral34 million ly
apart
IC 4367Spiral35 million ly
apart
IC 4312Lenticular35 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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