NGC 5916A

NGC 5916A

NGC 5916A is a barred spiral galaxy in the constellation Libra about 107 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 43,000 ly, about 43% of our Milky Way's width. The light reaching us tonight left it about 107 million years ago.

Illustration from its catalogued shape, not a photograph

Barred spiral
type · SBc
107 million ly
from Earth · from redshift
43k ly
across
14.6
apparent magnitude

Because its light is 107 million ly from home, you are seeing NGC 5916A as it looked roughly 107 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 5915Barred spiral380,000 ly
apart
NGC 5916Barred spiral2.6 million ly
apart
NGC 5892Spiral5.6 million ly
apart
IC 4536Barred spiral10 million ly
apart
NGC 5858Elliptical11 million ly
apart
IC 1084Elliptical14 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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