NGC 6861B

NGC 6861B

NGC 6861B is a lenticular galaxy in the constellation Telescopium about 132 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 46,000 ly, about 46% of our Milky Way's width. The light reaching us tonight left it about 132 million years ago.

Illustration from its catalogued shape, not a photograph

Lenticular
type · S0
132 million ly
from Earth · from redshift
46k ly
across
15.1
apparent magnitude

Because its light is 132 million ly from home, you are seeing NGC 6861B as it looked roughly 132 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 6861Elliptical990,000 ly
apart
NGC 6868Elliptical1.5 million ly
apart
IC 4943Elliptical3.3 million ly
apart
NGC 6870Spiral3.9 million ly
apart
NGC 6861CLenticular9.9 million ly
apart
NGC 6909Elliptical10 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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