NGC 4388 — SBb in Virgo
SBb in Virgo, 5.4 arcminutes across, its light 120 million years old. Measured by HyperLEDA, photographed by Pan-STARRS1. Recorded once.
About NGC 4388
NGC 4388 is a spiral in the Virgo Cluster that is losing its gas as it falls through the cluster. The pressure of the cluster's hot gas is sweeping a long plume out of its disc, and it also has an active nucleus, a black hole feeding at its centre.
What you are looking at
NGC 4388 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 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 188,000 light-years, about 1.9 times the width of the Milky Way.
What astronomers have recorded
SIMBAD, the reference database astronomers use, classes it as a Seyfert galaxy: its nucleus is lit by gas falling into its central black hole, though dust hides part of that glow from us. One supernova has been recorded in it: SN 2023fyq. It is cited in 1,447 scientific papers indexed by SIMBAD, and recorded there under 65 different catalogue designations.
When this light set out
The light that reaches us from NGC 4388 today set out about 120 million years ago, when the first flowering plants had appeared. The galaxy is moving away from us at about 2,515 km/s (5.6 million mph), carried by the expansion of the universe.
Finding it in the sky
In the sky, NGC 4388 sits within the constellation Virgo. It is best placed on spring evenings: around 9:30 pm in May it stands about 63° high in the south, seen from the middle of the United States.
Its neighbours
It lies in the direction of the Virgo Cluster and at a matching speed, which places it among the cluster’s more than a thousand galaxies, the nearest large cluster to the Milky Way. At almost the same distance from us, and so its neighbours in space as well as on the sky: NGC 4351 (0.6° away on the sky, at least 1,310,000 light-years from it); M88 (2.3° away on the sky, at least 4,850,000 light-years from it); M99 (2.4° away on the sky, at least 5,100,000 light-years from it); NGC 4200 (2.7° away on the sky, at least 5,730,000 light-years from it), and 4 more.
By apparent size it is number 105 of the 12,657 galaxies on the Galaxy Origins register.
Measurements
| Catalogue | PGC 40581 |
|---|---|
| Morphological type | SBb |
| Angular diameter | 5.38′ |
| Right ascension | 12h25m46.8s |
| Declination | +12°39′43.6″ |
| Constellation | Virgo |
| Inclination | 90.0° |
| Light travel time | 120 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 5.4 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.
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