NGC 545 — E-S0 in Cetus
E-S0 in Cetus, 3.0 arcminutes across, its light 254 million years old. Measured by HyperLEDA, photographed by Pan-STARRS1. Recorded once.
About NGC 545
What you are looking at
NGC 545 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. From edge to edge its visible disc spans about 221,000 light-years, about 2.3 times the width of the Milky Way.
What astronomers have recorded
SIMBAD, the reference database astronomers use, classes it as the brightest galaxy of its cluster. Halton Arp included it in his 1966 Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies as Arp 308, a list of galaxies with unusual, disturbed shapes. Boris Vorontsov-Velyaminov listed it as VV 963 in his catalogue of interacting galaxies. It is cited in 144 scientific papers indexed by SIMBAD, and recorded there under 30 different catalogue designations.
When this light set out
Its light has been travelling for about 254 million years. When it left, the continents had joined into Pangaea. The galaxy is moving away from us at about 5,338 km/s (11.9 million mph), carried by the expansion of the universe.
Finding it in the sky
In the sky, NGC 545 sits within the constellation Cetus. It is best placed on autumn evenings: around 9:30 pm in November it stands about 49° 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: UGC 984 (0.2° away on the sky, at least 1,080,000 light-years from it); NGC 538 (0.3° away on the sky, at least 1,110,000 light-years from it); NGC 557 (0.3° away on the sky, at least 1,400,000 light-years from it); NGC 530 (0.4° away on the sky, at least 1,790,000 light-years from it), and 11 more.
By apparent size it is number 516 of the 12,657 galaxies on the Galaxy Origins register.
Measurements
| Catalogue | PGC 5323 |
|---|---|
| Morphological type | E-S0 |
| Angular diameter | 3.01′ |
| Right ascension | 01h25m59.1s |
| Declination | -01°20′24.6″ |
| Constellation | Cetus |
| Inclination | 63.3° |
| Light travel time | 254 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 3.0 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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