NGC 4522 — Sc in Virgo
Sc in Virgo, 3.5 arcminutes across, its light 111 million years old. Measured by HyperLEDA, photographed by Pan-STARRS1. Recorded once.
About NGC 4522
What you are looking at
NGC 4522 is a late-type spiral: a small central bulge and open, loosely wound arms full of young stars and star-forming gas. 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 113,000 light-years, about 1.2 times the width of the Milky Way.
What astronomers have recorded
SIMBAD, the reference database astronomers use, classes it as a member of a group of galaxies. It is cited in 402 scientific papers indexed by SIMBAD, and recorded there under 27 different catalogue designations.
When this light set out
What a telescope records of NGC 4522 is light that left it about 111 million years ago; on Earth, the first flowering plants had appeared. The galaxy is moving away from us at about 2,320 km/s (5.2 million mph), carried by the expansion of the universe.
Finding it in the sky
In the sky, NGC 4522 sits within the constellation Virgo. It is best placed on spring evenings: around 9:30 pm in May it stands about 59° 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: IC 3430 (0.8° away on the sky, at least 1,620,000 light-years from it); NGC 4578 (1.0° away on the sky, at least 1,980,000 light-years from it); NGC 4470 (1.7° away on the sky, at least 3,250,000 light-years from it); NGC 4568 (2.2° away on the sky, at least 4,220,000 light-years from it), and 3 more.
By apparent size it is number 344 of the 12,657 galaxies on the Galaxy Origins register.
Measurements
| Catalogue | PGC 41729 |
|---|---|
| Morphological type | Sc |
| Angular diameter | 3.51′ |
| Right ascension | 12h33m39.7s |
| Declination | +09°10′29.5″ |
| Constellation | Virgo |
| Inclination | 79.2° |
| Light travel time | 111 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 3.5 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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