Tadpole Galaxy (UGC 10214) — Sc in Draco
The Tadpole Galaxy (UGC 10214) as a framed fine art print. Sc in Draco, 1.4 arcminutes across, its light 440 million years old. Measured by HyperLEDA…
About Tadpole Galaxy (UGC 10214)
The Tadpole Galaxy is a disrupted spiral trailing a tail of stars hundreds of thousands of light-years long, pulled out by a smaller galaxy that passed close by. The tail is dotted with clusters of young blue stars, and Hubble's image of it, with thousands of more distant galaxies in the background, is one of the telescope's best known.
What you are looking at
The Tadpole Galaxy is a late-type spiral: a small central bulge and open, loosely wound arms full of young stars and star-forming gas. Its disc is steeply tilted, about 64° from face-on, so it appears as a long oval. From edge to edge its visible disc spans about 182,000 light-years, about 1.9 times the width of the Milky Way.
What astronomers have recorded
SIMBAD, the reference database astronomers use, classes it as an interacting galaxy, visibly shaped by the pull of a neighbour. Halton Arp included it in his 1966 Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies as Arp 188, a list of galaxies with unusual, disturbed shapes. Boris Vorontsov-Velyaminov listed it as VV 29 in his catalogue of interacting galaxies. Two supernovae have been recorded in it, the first in 2007; the most recent include SN 2007cu, SN 2008dq. It is cited in 122 scientific papers indexed by SIMBAD, and recorded there under 15 different catalogue designations.
When this light set out
The light that reaches us from the Tadpole Galaxy today set out about 440 million years ago, when the first great extinction had struck the seas. The galaxy is moving away from us at about 9,338 km/s (20.9 million mph), carried by the expansion of the universe.
Finding it in the sky
In the sky, the Tadpole Galaxy sits within the constellation Draco. From most of the United States it never sets: it circles the north celestial pole all year, and stands highest on summer evenings, around June.
Its neighbours
At almost the same distance from us, and so its neighbours in space as well as on the sky: UGC 10361 (2.9° away on the sky, at least 21,890,000 light-years from it).
By apparent size it is number 4,218 of the 12,657 galaxies on the Galaxy Origins register.
Measurements
| Catalogue | PGC 57129 |
|---|---|
| Morphological type | Sc |
| Angular diameter | 1.45′ |
| Right ascension | 16h06m03.9s |
| Declination | +55°25′31.4″ |
| Constellation | Draco |
| Inclination | 63.7° |
| Light travel time | 440 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 1.4 arcminutes this is a Collection galaxy, which is the tier where a real photograph shows its shape and how far it is tilted away from us. The tier comes from the measured diameter, not from a price list.
Take this galaxy — $590 Browse the Collection