NGC 3190 — Sa in Leo
Sa in Leo, 3.6 arcminutes across, its light 63 million years old. Measured by HyperLEDA, photographed by Pan-STARRS1. Recorded once.
About NGC 3190
NGC 3190 is the brightest member of Hickson Compact Group 44, a group of four galaxies close together in Leo. Its dust lane is warped by the gravity of its neighbours.
What you are looking at
NGC 3190 is an early-type spiral: a large, bright central bulge wrapped in smooth, tightly wound arms. Its disc is turned almost exactly side-on to us: the galaxy appears as a narrow blade of light, and its dust as a dark seam running along it. From edge to edge its visible disc spans about 67,000 light-years (taking its redshift distance, which for a galaxy this near is approximate), about 68% of the Milky Way’s width.
What astronomers have recorded
SIMBAD, the reference database astronomers use, classes it as one of a pair of galaxies. Halton Arp included it in his 1966 Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies as Arp 316, a list of galaxies with unusual, disturbed shapes. It belongs to Hickson Compact Group 44, one of the hundred tight knots of galaxies catalogued by Paul Hickson in 1982. Boris Vorontsov-Velyaminov listed it as VV 307 in his catalogue of interacting galaxies. Two supernovae have been recorded in it, the first in 2002; the most recent include SN 2002bo, SN 2002cv. It is cited in 428 scientific papers indexed by SIMBAD, and recorded there under 24 different catalogue designations.
When this light set out
What a telescope records of NGC 3190 is light that left it about 63 million years ago; on Earth, an asteroid had ended the age of dinosaurs. The galaxy is moving away from us at about 1,317 km/s (2.9 million mph), carried by the expansion of the universe. For a galaxy this close, its own motion through space is a large share of that speed, so the distance worked out from it is approximate; distances measured from individual stars in it can differ.
Finding it in the sky
In the sky, NGC 3190 sits within the constellation Leo. It is best placed on spring evenings: around 9:30 pm in April it stands about 72° high in the south, seen from the middle of the United States.
Its neighbours
At almost the same distance from us, and so its neighbours in space as well as on the sky: NGC 3187 (5′ away on the sky, at least 90,000 light-years from it); NGC 3185 (0.2° away on the sky, at least 200,000 light-years from it); UGC 5574 (0.7° away on the sky, at least 800,000 light-years from it); NGC 3177 (0.8° away on the sky, at least 880,000 light-years from it), and 8 more.
By apparent size it is number 302 of the 12,657 galaxies on the Galaxy Origins register.
Measurements
| Catalogue | PGC 30083 |
|---|---|
| Morphological type | Sa |
| Angular diameter | 3.64′ |
| Right ascension | 10h18m06.3s |
| Declination | +21°49′57.7″ |
| Constellation | Leo |
| Inclination | 87.8° |
| Light travel time | 63 million years |
| Bar | not recorded |
Check every figure above in the NASA/IPAC Extragalactic Database
What is sold
A print of this galaxy and the record of the calculation, once. When it sells it leaves the register and is not offered again. We assign no names and no ownership — nobody can sell you those.
At 3.6 arcminutes this is a Exceptional galaxy, which is the tier where a real photograph shows clear structure and dust lanes. The tier comes from the measured diameter, not from a price list.
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