NGC 5720

NGC 5720

NGC 5720 is a barred spiral galaxy in the constellation Boötes about 365 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 200,000 ly, about 2.0 times the width of our Milky Way. The light reaching us tonight left it about 365 million years ago.

Illustration from its catalogued shape, not a photograph

Barred spiral
type · SBb
365 million ly
from Earth · from redshift
202k ly
across
14.4
apparent magnitude

Because its light is 365 million ly from home, you are seeing NGC 5720 as it looked roughly 365 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 1074Barred spiral14 million ly
apart
NGC 5818Lenticular22 million ly
apart
IC 1033Elliptical22 million ly
apart
NGC 5767Spiral25 million ly
apart
IC 4528Barred spiral26 million ly
apart
NGC 5835Spiral31 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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