NGC 4618 — SBm in Canes Venatici
SBm in Canes Venatici, 3.6 arcminutes across, its light 26 million years old. Measured by HyperLEDA, photographed by Pan-STARRS1. Recorded once.
About NGC 4618
What you are looking at
NGC 4618 is a Magellanic spiral, a small, lopsided disc much like the Large Magellanic Cloud, with almost no central bulge. A bar of stars runs straight across its centre, as one does across the centre of the Milky Way. It is tilted about 58° to our line of sight, enough to show both the shape of its arms and the depth of its disc. From edge to edge its visible disc spans about 27,000 light-years (taking its redshift distance, which for a galaxy this near is approximate), about a quarter the width of the Milky Way.
What astronomers have recorded
SIMBAD, the reference database astronomers use, classes it as one of a pair of galaxies. Halton Arp included it in his 1966 Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies as Arp 23, a list of galaxies with unusual, disturbed shapes. Boris Vorontsov-Velyaminov listed it as VV 73 in his catalogue of interacting galaxies. One supernova has been recorded in it: SN 1985F. It is cited in 349 scientific papers indexed by SIMBAD, and recorded there under 22 different catalogue designations.
When this light set out
What a telescope records of NGC 4618 is light that left it about 26 million years ago; on Earth, Antarctica had begun to freeze. The galaxy is moving away from us at about 538 km/s (1.2 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
In the sky, NGC 4618 sits within the constellation Canes Venatici. It is best placed on spring evenings: around 9:30 pm in May it stands about 89° high in the north, close to overhead, 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: NGC 4625 (0.1° away on the sky, at least 60,000 light-years from it); UGC 7774 (1.5° away on the sky, at least 680,000 light-years from it); Cat's Eye Galaxy (1.8° away on the sky, at least 790,000 light-years from it); NGC 4490 (2.1° away on the sky, at least 950,000 light-years from it), and 4 more.
By apparent size it is number 328 of the 12,657 galaxies on the Galaxy Origins register.
Measurements
| Catalogue | PGC 42575 |
|---|---|
| Morphological type | SBm |
| Angular diameter | 3.56′ |
| Right ascension | 12h41m32.9s |
| Declination | +41°09′03.4″ |
| Constellation | Canes Venatici |
| Inclination | 57.6° |
| Light travel time | 26 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 3.6 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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