M66 (NGC 3627) — Sb in Leo
Sb in Leo, 10.3 arcminutes across, its light 35 million years old. Measured by HyperLEDA, photographed by Pan-STARRS1. Recorded once.
About M66 (NGC 3627)
Messier 66 is the brightest of the Leo Triplet. Its encounter with its neighbours has distorted it: its arms are uneven and one appears lifted out of the plane of the disc, and its core is unusually bright. Several supernovae have been seen in it, and its dusty, lopsided arms make it one of the most dramatic galaxies to photograph in the spring sky.
What you are looking at
M66 is a spiral with a sizeable central bulge and well-defined arms, close in type to the Milky Way. Its disc is steeply tilted, about 68° from face-on, so it appears as a long oval. From edge to edge its visible disc spans about 103,000 light-years (taking its redshift distance, which for a galaxy this near is approximate), close to the width of the Milky Way.
What astronomers have recorded
SIMBAD, the reference database astronomers use, classes it as a galaxy with an active nucleus, powered by its central black hole. Halton Arp included it in his 1966 Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies as Arp 16 and 317, a list of galaxies with unusual, disturbed shapes. Boris Vorontsov-Velyaminov listed it as VV 308 in his catalogue of interacting galaxies. Four supernovae have been recorded in it, the first in 1973; the most recent include SN 1989B, SN 2009hd, SN 2016cok. It is cited in 1,540 scientific papers indexed by SIMBAD, and recorded there under 56 different catalogue designations.
When this light set out
The light that reaches us from M66 today set out about 35 million years ago, when the planet had come through its hottest interval since the dinosaurs. The galaxy is moving away from us at about 719 km/s (1.6 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, M66 sits within the constellation Leo. It is best placed on spring evenings: around 9:30 pm in April it stands about 63° 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: M65 (0.3° away on the sky, at least 200,000 light-years from it); Hamburger Galaxy (0.6° away on the sky, at least 360,000 light-years from it); NGC 3593 (1.4° away on the sky, at least 830,000 light-years from it); NGC 3666 (1.9° away on the sky, at least 1,170,000 light-years from it).
By apparent size it is number 15 of the 12,657 galaxies on the Galaxy Origins register.
Measurements
| Catalogue | PGC 34695 |
|---|---|
| Morphological type | Sb |
| Angular diameter | 10.28′ |
| Right ascension | 11h20m15.0s |
| Declination | +12°59′29.8″ |
| Constellation | Leo |
| Inclination | 67.5° |
| Light travel time | 35 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 10.3 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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