NGC 4568 — Sbc in Virgo
Sbc in Virgo, 4.3 arcminutes across, its light 107 million years old. Measured by HyperLEDA, photographed by Pan-STARRS1. Recorded once.
About NGC 4568
What you are looking at
NGC 4568 is a spiral of the same broad class astronomers give the Milky Way: a moderate bulge and clearly drawn arms. Its disc is steeply tilted, about 68° from face-on, so it appears as a long oval. From edge to edge its visible disc spans about 134,000 light-years, about 1.4 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. Boris Vorontsov-Velyaminov listed it as VV 219 in his catalogue of interacting galaxies. Four supernovae have been recorded in it, the first in 1990; the most recent include SN 2004cc, SN 2020fqv, SN 2023ijd. It is cited in 397 scientific papers indexed by SIMBAD, and recorded there under 34 different catalogue designations.
When this light set out
The light that reaches us from NGC 4568 today set out about 107 million years ago, when the first flowering plants had appeared. The galaxy is moving away from us at about 2,236 km/s (5.0 million mph), carried by the expansion of the universe.
Finding it in the sky
In the sky, NGC 4568 sits within the constellation Virgo. It is best placed on spring evenings: around 9:30 pm in May it stands about 61° 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 4567 (1′ away on the sky, at least 40,000 light-years from it); NGC 4607 (1.3° away on the sky, at least 2,440,000 light-years from it); NGC 4578 (1.7° away on the sky, at least 3,170,000 light-years from it); NGC 4641 (1.8° away on the sky, at least 3,350,000 light-years from it), and 7 more.
By apparent size it is number 189 of the 12,657 galaxies on the Galaxy Origins register.
Measurements
| Catalogue | PGC 42069 |
|---|---|
| Morphological type | Sbc |
| Angular diameter | 4.30′ |
| Right ascension | 12h36m34.3s |
| Declination | +11°14′20.0″ |
| Constellation | Virgo |
| Inclination | 67.5° |
| Light travel time | 107 million years |
| Bar | not recorded |
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 4.3 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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