NGC 4535 — Sc in Virgo
Sc in Virgo, 8.1 arcminutes across, its light 94 million years old. Measured by HyperLEDA, photographed by Pan-STARRS1. Recorded once.
About NGC 4535
NGC 4535 is a barred spiral in the Virgo Cluster. Amateur astronomers call it the Lost Galaxy, because its light is spread so evenly that it can be hard to find in a small telescope. Hubble measured Cepheid stars in it to calibrate the distance scale.
What you are looking at
NGC 4535 is a late-type spiral: a small central bulge and open, loosely wound arms full of young stars and star-forming gas. We look down on it almost face-on, so its structure is laid out as if on a map. From edge to edge its visible disc spans about 222,000 light-years, about 2.3 times the width of the Milky Way.
What astronomers have recorded
SIMBAD, the reference database astronomers use, classes it as an HII galaxy, glowing with clouds of hydrogen lit by young stars. It is cited in 696 scientific papers indexed by SIMBAD, and recorded there under 31 different catalogue designations.
When this light set out
Its light has been travelling for about 94 million years. When it left, dinosaurs were at their peak. The galaxy is moving away from us at about 1,962 km/s (4.4 million mph), carried by the expansion of the universe.
Finding it in the sky
NGC 4535 lies in Virgo. It is best placed on spring evenings: around 9:30 pm in May it stands about 58° 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 4492 (0.8° away on the sky, at least 1,370,000 light-years from it); UGC 7802 (1.0° away on the sky, at least 1,700,000 light-years from it); NGC 4570 (1.1° away on the sky, at least 1,870,000 light-years from it); IC 3430 (1.3° away on the sky, at least 2,190,000 light-years from it), and 9 more.
By apparent size it is number 29 of the 12,657 galaxies on the Galaxy Origins register.
Measurements
| Catalogue | PGC 41812 |
|---|---|
| Morphological type | Sc |
| Angular diameter | 8.15′ |
| Right ascension | 12h34m20.3s |
| Declination | +08°11′52.7″ |
| Constellation | Virgo |
| Inclination | 23.8° |
| Light travel time | 94 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 8.1 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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