NGC 7727 — SABa in Aquarius
SABa in Aquarius, 3.6 arcminutes across, its light 89 million years old. Measured by HyperLEDA, photographed by Pan-STARRS1. Recorded once.
About NGC 7727
NGC 7727 is the remnant of a merger between two galaxies. Its centre holds two nuclei, each with a supermassive black hole, and they are among the closest pair of such black holes ever found.
What you are looking at
NGC 7727 is an early-type spiral: a large, bright central bulge wrapped in smooth, tightly wound arms. A weak bar of stars crosses its centre. It is tilted about 43° 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 94,000 light-years, close to the width of the Milky Way.
What astronomers have recorded
SIMBAD, the reference database astronomers use, classes it as an emission-line galaxy: its spectrum shows the glow of gas lit by young stars. Halton Arp included it in his 1966 Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies as Arp 222, a list of galaxies with unusual, disturbed shapes. Boris Vorontsov-Velyaminov listed it as VV 67 in his catalogue of interacting galaxies. It is cited in 187 scientific papers indexed by SIMBAD, and recorded there under 9 different catalogue designations.
When this light set out
The light that reaches us from NGC 7727 today set out about 89 million years ago, when dinosaurs were at their peak. The galaxy is moving away from us at about 1,857 km/s (4.2 million mph), carried by the expansion of the universe.
Finding it in the sky
NGC 7727 lies in Aquarius. It is best placed on autumn evenings: around 9:30 pm in October it stands about 38° 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 7724 (0.2° away on the sky, at least 310,000 light-years from it); NGC 7723 (0.7° away on the sky, at least 1,100,000 light-years from it).
By apparent size it is number 313 of the 12,657 galaxies on the Galaxy Origins register.
Measurements
| Catalogue | PGC 72060 |
|---|---|
| Morphological type | SABa |
| Angular diameter | 3.62′ |
| Right ascension | 23h39m53.8s |
| Declination | -12°17′34.0″ |
| Constellation | Aquarius |
| Inclination | 43.4° |
| Light travel time | 89 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 3.6 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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