NGC 4654 — Sc in Virgo
Sc in Virgo, 4.7 arcminutes across, its light 50 million years old. Measured by HyperLEDA, photographed by Pan-STARRS1. Recorded once.
About NGC 4654
What you are looking at
NGC 4654 is a late-type spiral: a small central bulge and open, loosely wound arms full of young stars and star-forming gas. It is tilted about 60° 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 69,000 light-years (taking its redshift distance, which for a galaxy this near is approximate), about 70% of the Milky Way’s width.
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 609 scientific papers indexed by SIMBAD, and recorded there under 34 different catalogue designations.
When this light set out
What a telescope records of NGC 4654 is light that left it about 50 million years ago; on Earth, the planet had come through its hottest interval since the dinosaurs. The galaxy is moving away from us at about 1,043 km/s (2.3 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 4654 sits within the constellation Virgo. It is best placed on spring evenings: around 9:30 pm in May it stands about 63° 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 4639 (0.3° away on the sky, at least 250,000 light-years from it); IC 3742 (0.4° away on the sky, at least 380,000 light-years from it); NGC 4620 (0.5° away on the sky, at least 450,000 light-years from it); IC 3718 (0.8° away on the sky, at least 700,000 light-years from it), and 12 more.
By apparent size it is number 145 of the 12,657 galaxies on the Galaxy Origins register.
Measurements
| Catalogue | PGC 42857 |
|---|---|
| Morphological type | Sc |
| Angular diameter | 4.72′ |
| Right ascension | 12h43m56.6s |
| Declination | +13°07′35.5″ |
| Constellation | Virgo |
| Inclination | 59.8° |
| Light travel time | 50 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 4.7 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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