NGC 5850 — Sb in Virgo
Sb in Virgo, 3.4 arcminutes across, its light 122 million years old. Measured by HyperLEDA, photographed by Pan-STARRS1. Recorded once.
About NGC 5850
What you are looking at
NGC 5850 is a spiral with a sizeable central bulge and well-defined arms, close in type to the Milky Way. It is tilted about 47° to our line of sight, enough to show both the shape of its arms and the depth of its disc. From edge to edge its visible disc spans about 118,000 light-years, about 1.2 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 331 scientific papers indexed by SIMBAD, and recorded there under 27 different catalogue designations.
When this light set out
The light that reaches us from NGC 5850 today set out about 122 million years ago, when the first flowering plants had appeared. The galaxy is moving away from us at about 2,546 km/s (5.7 million mph), carried by the expansion of the universe.
Finding it in the sky
In the sky, NGC 5850 sits within the constellation Virgo. It is best placed on summer evenings: around 9:30 pm in June it stands about 52° high in the south, seen from the middle of the United States.
By apparent size it is number 405 of the 12,657 galaxies on the Galaxy Origins register.
Measurements
| Catalogue | PGC 53979 |
|---|---|
| Morphological type | Sb |
| Angular diameter | 3.35′ |
| Right ascension | 15h07m07.7s |
| Declination | +01°32′40.4″ |
| Constellation | Virgo |
| Inclination | 46.9° |
| Light travel time | 122 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 3.4 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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