NGC 4088 — SABc in Ursa Major
SABc in Ursa Major, 5.5 arcminutes across, its light 36 million years old. Measured by HyperLEDA, photographed by Pan-STARRS1. Recorded once.
About NGC 4088
NGC 4088 is a spiral in Ursa Major with one arm visibly detached and distorted, likely by an encounter with its neighbour NGC 4085.
What you are looking at
NGC 4088 is a late-type spiral: a small central bulge and open, loosely wound arms full of young stars and star-forming gas. A weak bar of stars crosses its centre. Its disc is steeply tilted, about 71° from face-on, so it appears as a long oval. From edge to edge its visible disc spans about 57,000 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
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 18, a list of galaxies with unusual, disturbed shapes. Boris Vorontsov-Velyaminov listed it as VV 357 in his catalogue of interacting galaxies. Three supernovae have been recorded in it, the first in 1991; the most recent include SN 1991G, SN 2009dd, SN 2022jzc. It is cited in 437 scientific papers indexed by SIMBAD, and recorded there under 45 different catalogue designations.
When this light set out
Its light has been travelling for about 36 million years. When it left, the planet had come through its hottest interval since the dinosaurs. The galaxy is moving away from us at about 749 km/s (1.7 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
NGC 4088 lies in Ursa Major. From most of the United States it never sets: it circles the north celestial pole all year, and stands highest on spring evenings, around April.
Its neighbours
At almost the same distance from us, and so its neighbours in space as well as on the sky: NGC 4085 (0.2° away on the sky, at least 120,000 light-years from it); UGC 6992 (0.8° away on the sky, at least 530,000 light-years from it); NGC 4157 (0.9° away on the sky, at least 550,000 light-years from it); UGC 7176 (0.9° away on the sky, at least 560,000 light-years from it), and 16 more.
By apparent size it is number 99 of the 12,657 galaxies on the Galaxy Origins register.
Measurements
| Catalogue | PGC 38302 |
|---|---|
| Morphological type | SABc |
| Angular diameter | 5.48′ |
| Right ascension | 12h05m33.9s |
| Declination | +50°32′19.8″ |
| Constellation | Ursa Major |
| Inclination | 71.3° |
| Light travel time | 36 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 5.5 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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