NGC 5666

NGC 5666

NGC 5666 is a lenticular galaxy in the constellation Boötes about 104 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 29,000 ly, about 29% of our Milky Way's width. The light reaching us tonight left it about 104 million years ago.

Illustration from its catalogued shape, not a photograph

Lenticular
type · S0
104 million ly
from Earth · from redshift
29k ly
across
13.5
apparent magnitude

Because its light is 104 million ly from home, you are seeing NGC 5666 as it looked roughly 104 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 5665Spiral4.4 million ly
apart
NGC 5587Lenticular8.6 million ly
apart
NGC 5600Spiral8.9 million ly
apart
NGC 5661Barred spiral10 million ly
apart
NGC 5492Barred spiral20 million ly
apart
NGC 5762Spiral22 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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