NGC 4395 — Sm in Canes Venatici
Sm in Canes Venatici, 4.2 arcminutes across, its light 15 million years old. Measured by HyperLEDA, photographed by Pan-STARRS1. Recorded once.
About NGC 4395
NGC 4395 is a faint, low-surface-brightness spiral that hides one of the smallest black holes known at the centre of a galaxy, only a few thousand to a few hundred thousand times the mass of the Sun.
What you are looking at
NGC 4395 is a Magellanic spiral, a small, lopsided disc much like the Large Magellanic Cloud, with almost no central bulge. We see it almost exactly edge-on, so its whole disc appears as one thin band of light, with dust showing as a dark line along its length. From edge to edge its visible disc spans about 19,000 light-years (taking its redshift distance, which for a galaxy this near is approximate), about a fifth 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. It is cited in 1,311 scientific papers indexed by SIMBAD, and recorded there under 46 different catalogue designations.
When this light set out
The light that reaches us from NGC 4395 today set out about 15 million years ago, when grasslands were spreading across the continents. The galaxy is moving away from us at about 318 km/s (0.7 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 4395 lies in Canes Venatici. It is best placed on spring evenings: around 9:30 pm in May it stands about 84° 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: UGC 7605 (2.2° away on the sky, at least 600,000 light-years from it); UGC 7698 (2.5° away on the sky, at least 670,000 light-years from it).
By apparent size it is number 210 of the 12,657 galaxies on the Galaxy Origins register.
Measurements
| Catalogue | PGC 40596 |
|---|---|
| Morphological type | Sm |
| Angular diameter | 4.17′ |
| Right ascension | 12h25m48.9s |
| Declination | +33°32′48.4″ |
| Constellation | Canes Venatici |
| Inclination | 90.0° |
| Light travel time | 15 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 4.2 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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