NGC 3432 — SBm in Leo Minor
SBm in Leo Minor, 7.4 arcminutes across, its light 30 million years old. Measured by HyperLEDA, photographed by Pan-STARRS1. Recorded once.
About NGC 3432
NGC 3432 is a thin, edge-on Magellanic spiral that is interacting with a small neighbour, UGC 5983. The encounter has drawn a faint stream of stars and gas between them. Amateur astronomers sometimes call it the Knitting Needle Galaxy.
What you are looking at
NGC 3432 is a Magellanic spiral, a small, lopsided disc much like the Large Magellanic Cloud, with almost no central bulge. A bar of stars runs straight across its centre, as one does across the centre of the Milky Way. 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 64,000 light-years (taking its redshift distance, which for a galaxy this near is approximate), about half the width of the Milky Way.
What astronomers have recorded
Halton Arp included it in his 1966 Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies as Arp 206, a list of galaxies with unusual, disturbed shapes. Boris Vorontsov-Velyaminov listed it as VV 11 in his catalogue of interacting galaxies. One supernova has been recorded in it: SN 2000ch. It is cited in 329 scientific papers indexed by SIMBAD, and recorded there under 32 different catalogue designations.
When this light set out
The light that reaches us from NGC 3432 today set out about 30 million years ago, when Antarctica had begun to freeze. The galaxy is moving away from us at about 618 km/s (1.4 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 3432 sits within the constellation Leo Minor. It is best placed on spring evenings: around 9:30 pm in April it stands about 87° 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: UGC 5983 (3′ away on the sky, at least 30,000 light-years from it); UGC 5829 (2.9° away on the sky, at least 1,530,000 light-years from it).
By apparent size it is number 36 of the 12,657 galaxies on the Galaxy Origins register.
Measurements
| Catalogue | PGC 32643 |
|---|---|
| Morphological type | SBm |
| Angular diameter | 7.41′ |
| Right ascension | 10h52m31.0s |
| Declination | +36°37′09.0″ |
| Constellation | Leo Minor |
| Inclination | 90.0° |
| Light travel time | 30 million years |
| Bar | yes, from the catalogue |
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 7.4 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.
Take this galaxy — $1,290 Browse the Collection