NGC 655

NGC 655

NGC 655 is a lenticular galaxy in the constellation Cetus about 406 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 130,000 ly, about the width of our Milky Way. The light reaching us tonight left it about 406 million years ago.

Illustration from its catalogued shape, not a photograph

Lenticular
type · S0
406 million ly
from Earth · from redshift
132k ly
across
14.7
apparent magnitude

Because its light is 406 million ly from home, you are seeing NGC 655 as it looked roughly 406 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 169Elliptical19 million ly
apart
IC 1667Spiral56 million ly
apart
NGC 640Barred spiral62 million ly
apart
NGC 649Spiral64 million ly
apart
NGC 539Spiral68 million ly
apart
NGC 367Spiral73 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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