NGC 4866 — S0-a in Virgo
S0-a in Virgo, 5.8 arcminutes across, its light 95 million years old. Measured by HyperLEDA, photographed by Pan-STARRS1. Recorded once.
About NGC 4866
What you are looking at
NGC 4866 is a lenticular galaxy: a disc galaxy that has largely used up the gas it needs to form new stars, so its disc is smooth and has no spiral arms. We see it almost exactly edge-on, so its whole disc appears as one thin band of light, with dust showing as a dark line along its length. From edge to edge its visible disc spans about 159,000 light-years, about 1.6 times the width of the Milky Way.
What astronomers have recorded
SIMBAD, the reference database astronomers use, classes it as a LINER galaxy: its nucleus shows the faint, low-level activity of a black hole feeding slowly. It is cited in 223 scientific papers indexed by SIMBAD, and recorded there under 16 different catalogue designations.
When this light set out
What a telescope records of NGC 4866 is light that left it about 95 million years ago; on Earth, dinosaurs were at their peak. The galaxy is moving away from us at about 1,985 km/s (4.4 million mph), carried by the expansion of the universe.
Finding it in the sky
NGC 4866 lies in Virgo. It is best placed on spring evenings: around 9:30 pm in May it stands about 64° 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: UGC 8085 (0.5° away on the sky, at least 790,000 light-years from it); NGC 4746 (2.8° away on the sky, at least 4,600,000 light-years from it).
By apparent size it is number 88 of the 12,657 galaxies on the Galaxy Origins register.
Measurements
| Catalogue | PGC 44600 |
|---|---|
| Morphological type | S0-a |
| Angular diameter | 5.77′ |
| Right ascension | 12h59m27.1s |
| Declination | +14°10′15.6″ |
| Constellation | Virgo |
| Inclination | 90.0° |
| Light travel time | 95 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 5.8 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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