Hamburger Galaxy (NGC 3628) — SBb in Leo
The Hamburger Galaxy (NGC 3628) as a framed fine art print. SBb in Leo, 11.0 arcminutes across, its light 41 million years old. Measured by HyperLEDA…
About Hamburger Galaxy (NGC 3628)
The Hamburger Galaxy is the edge-on member of the Leo Triplet, three galaxies that can share a single telescope field. A broad, dark lane of dust cuts it lengthwise, giving it the look of a bun around a filling. Its encounter with its neighbours, Messier 65 and Messier 66, has drawn out a faint tail of stars that stretches for hundreds of thousands of light-years.
What you are looking at
The Hamburger Galaxy is a spiral with a sizeable central bulge and well-defined arms, close in type to the Milky Way. A bar of stars runs straight across its centre, as one does across the centre of the Milky Way. Its disc is steeply tilted, about 79° from face-on, so it appears as a long oval. From edge to edge its visible disc spans about 130,000 light-years (taking its redshift distance, which for a galaxy this near is approximate), about 1.3 times the width of the Milky Way.
What astronomers have recorded
SIMBAD, the reference database astronomers use, classes it as a LINER galaxy: its nucleus shows the faint, low-level activity of a black hole feeding slowly. Halton Arp included it in his 1966 Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies as Arp 317, a list of galaxies with unusual, disturbed shapes. Boris Vorontsov-Velyaminov listed it as VV 308 in his catalogue of interacting galaxies. It is cited in 861 scientific papers indexed by SIMBAD, and recorded there under 49 different catalogue designations.
When this light set out
What a telescope records of the Hamburger Galaxy is light that left it about 41 million years ago; on Earth, the planet had come through its hottest interval since the dinosaurs. The galaxy is moving away from us at about 845 km/s (1.9 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, the Hamburger Galaxy sits within the constellation Leo. It is best placed on spring evenings: around 9:30 pm in April it stands about 64° 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 (0.6° away on the sky, at least 420,000 light-years from it); M66 (0.6° away on the sky, at least 420,000 light-years from it); NGC 3593 (1.6° away on the sky, at least 1,120,000 light-years from it); NGC 3596 (1.7° away on the sky, at least 1,230,000 light-years from it), and 1 more.
By apparent size it is number 11 of the 12,657 galaxies on the Galaxy Origins register.
Measurements
| Catalogue | PGC 34697 |
|---|---|
| Morphological type | SBb |
| Angular diameter | 11.04′ |
| Right ascension | 11h20m17.0s |
| Declination | +13°35′22.7″ |
| Constellation | Leo |
| Inclination | 79.3° |
| Light travel time | 41 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 11.0 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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