NGC 520 — Sa in Pisces
Sa in Pisces, 4.1 arcminutes across, its light 104 million years old. Measured by HyperLEDA, photographed by Pan-STARRS1. Recorded once.
About NGC 520
NGC 520 is two disc galaxies in the late stage of merging. Their collision has left a tangled disc of dust and a tail of stars, and it is one of the brightest merging systems in the sky.
What you are looking at
NGC 520 is an early-type spiral: a large, bright central bulge wrapped in smooth, tightly wound arms. 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 123,000 light-years, about 1.3 times the width of the Milky Way.
What astronomers have recorded
SIMBAD, the reference database astronomers use, classes it as a galaxy with an active nucleus, powered by its central black hole. Halton Arp included it in his 1966 Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies as Arp 157, a list of galaxies with unusual, disturbed shapes. Boris Vorontsov-Velyaminov listed it as VV 231 in his catalogue of interacting galaxies. It is cited in 531 scientific papers indexed by SIMBAD, and recorded there under 34 different catalogue designations.
When this light set out
The light that reaches us from NGC 520 today set out about 104 million years ago, when the first flowering plants had appeared. The galaxy is moving away from us at about 2,162 km/s (4.8 million mph), carried by the expansion of the universe.
Finding it in the sky
In the sky, NGC 520 sits within the constellation Pisces. It is best placed on autumn evenings: around 9:30 pm in November 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 474 (1.2° away on the sky, at least 2,120,000 light-years from it); NGC 470 (1.3° away on the sky, at least 2,280,000 light-years from it); NGC 488 (1.6° away on the sky, at least 2,930,000 light-years from it); UGC 888 (1.9° away on the sky, at least 3,340,000 light-years from it), and 6 more.
By apparent size it is number 227 of the 12,657 galaxies on the Galaxy Origins register.
Measurements
| Catalogue | PGC 5193 |
|---|---|
| Morphological type | Sa |
| Angular diameter | 4.09′ |
| Right ascension | 01h24m35.1s |
| Declination | +03°47′32.6″ |
| Constellation | Pisces |
| Inclination | 75.7° |
| Light travel time | 104 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 4.1 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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