NGC 5005 — SABb in Canes Venatici
SABb in Canes Venatici, 4.8 arcminutes across, its light 46 million years old. Measured by HyperLEDA, photographed by Pan-STARRS1. Recorded once.
About NGC 5005
NGC 5005 is a bright spiral in Canes Venatici with a very luminous centre, one of the low-level active nuclei found in many nearby galaxies.
What you are looking at
NGC 5005 is a spiral with a sizeable central bulge and well-defined arms, close in type to the Milky Way. A weak bar of stars crosses its centre. Its disc is steeply tilted, about 77° from face-on, so it appears as a long oval. From edge to edge its visible disc spans about 64,000 light-years (taking its redshift distance, which for a galaxy this near is approximate), about half 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. Patrick Moore listed it as Caldwell 29 in his 1995 catalogue of the finest deep-sky objects for amateur observers. One supernova has been recorded in it: SN 1996ai. It is cited in 576 scientific papers indexed by SIMBAD, and recorded there under 56 different catalogue designations.
When this light set out
What a telescope records of NGC 5005 is light that left it about 46 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 948 km/s (2.1 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 5005 sits within the constellation Canes Venatici. It is best placed on spring evenings: around 9:30 pm in May it stands about 87° high in the south, 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 5002 (0.4° away on the sky, at least 340,000 light-years from it); NGC 5033 (0.7° away on the sky, at least 550,000 light-years from it); NGC 5014 (0.8° away on the sky, at least 620,000 light-years from it); UGC 8303 (1.0° away on the sky, at least 770,000 light-years from it), and 4 more.
By apparent size it is number 137 of the 12,657 galaxies on the Galaxy Origins register.
Measurements
| Catalogue | PGC 45749 |
|---|---|
| Morphological type | SABb |
| Angular diameter | 4.82′ |
| Right ascension | 13h10m56.3s |
| Declination | +37°03′32.4″ |
| Constellation | Canes Venatici |
| Inclination | 77.1° |
| Light travel time | 46 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 4.8 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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