NGC 5566 — SBab in Virgo
SBab in Virgo, 5.4 arcminutes across, its light 73 million years old. Measured by HyperLEDA, photographed by Pan-STARRS1. Recorded once.
About NGC 5566
What you are looking at
NGC 5566 is an early-type spiral: a large, bright central bulge wrapped in smooth, tightly wound arms. A bar of stars runs straight across its centre, as one does across the centre of the Milky Way. Its disc is steeply tilted, about 76° from face-on, so it appears as a long oval. From edge to edge its visible disc spans about 114,000 light-years, about 1.2 times the width of the Milky Way.
What astronomers have recorded
Halton Arp included it in his 1966 Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies as Arp 286, a list of galaxies with unusual, disturbed shapes. It is cited in 196 scientific papers indexed by SIMBAD, and recorded there under 24 different catalogue designations.
When this light set out
What a telescope records of NGC 5566 is light that left it about 73 million years ago; on Earth, dinosaurs were at their peak. The galaxy is moving away from us at about 1,529 km/s (3.4 million mph), carried by the expansion of the universe.
Finding it in the sky
In the sky, NGC 5566 sits within the constellation Virgo. It is best placed on summer evenings: around 9:30 pm in June it stands about 54° 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 5569 (4′ away on the sky, at least 90,000 light-years from it); NGC 5560 (5′ away on the sky, at least 110,000 light-years from it); NGC 5577 (0.5° away on the sky, at least 700,000 light-years from it); NGC 5574 (0.7° away on the sky, at least 910,000 light-years from it), and 5 more.
By apparent size it is number 107 of the 12,657 galaxies on the Galaxy Origins register.
Measurements
| Catalogue | PGC 51233 |
|---|---|
| Morphological type | SBab |
| Angular diameter | 5.36′ |
| Right ascension | 14h20m19.8s |
| Declination | +03°56′00.7″ |
| Constellation | Virgo |
| Inclination | 75.6° |
| Light travel time | 73 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 5.4 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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