NGC 6878A

NGC 6878A

NGC 6878A is a spiral galaxy in the constellation Sagittarius about 250 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 140,000 ly, about the width of our Milky Way. It is receding from us at about 5,289 km/s.

Illustration from its catalogued shape, not a photograph

Spiral
type · SABb
250 million ly
from Earth · from redshift
136k ly
across
13.3
apparent magnitude
5,289 km/s
receding (RC3)

Because its light is 250 million ly from home, you are seeing NGC 6878A as it looked roughly 250 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 4956Elliptical12 million ly
apart
NGC 6918Lenticular18 million ly
apart
NGC 6878Spiral21 million ly
apart
IC 4991Lenticular23 million ly
apart
IC 4926Elliptical30 million ly
apart
IC 4916Barred spiral32 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).

← all galaxies