NGC 3981 — Sbc in Crater
Sbc in Crater, 3.3 arcminutes across, its light 82 million years old. Measured by HyperLEDA, photographed by Pan-STARRS1. Recorded once.
About NGC 3981
What you are looking at
NGC 3981 is a spiral of the same broad class astronomers give the Milky Way: a moderate bulge and clearly drawn arms. It is tilted about 52° to our line of sight, enough to show both the shape of its arms and the depth of its disc. From edge to edge its visible disc spans about 79,000 light-years, about 81% 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 289, a list of galaxies with unusual, disturbed shapes. Boris Vorontsov-Velyaminov listed it as VV 8 in his catalogue of interacting galaxies. It is cited in 119 scientific papers indexed by SIMBAD, and recorded there under 21 different catalogue designations.
When this light set out
What a telescope records of NGC 3981 is light that left it about 82 million years ago; on Earth, dinosaurs were at their peak. The galaxy is moving away from us at about 1,717 km/s (3.8 million mph), carried by the expansion of the universe.
Finding it in the sky
NGC 3981 lies in Crater. It is best placed on spring evenings: around 9:30 pm in April it stands about 30° 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 3957 (0.6° away on the sky, at least 850,000 light-years from it); NGC 3956 (0.8° away on the sky, at least 1,200,000 light-years from it); NGC 4027A (1.0° away on the sky, at least 1,400,000 light-years from it); NGC 4027 (1.0° away on the sky, at least 1,460,000 light-years from it), and 2 more.
By apparent size it is number 410 of the 12,657 galaxies on the Galaxy Origins register.
Measurements
| Catalogue | PGC 37496 |
|---|---|
| Morphological type | Sbc |
| Angular diameter | 3.32′ |
| Right ascension | 11h56m07.4s |
| Declination | -19°53′45.9″ |
| Constellation | Crater |
| Inclination | 52.4° |
| Light travel time | 82 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 3.3 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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