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Messier 74 (also known as NGC 628 and Phantom Galaxy) is a large spiral galaxy in the equatorial constellation Pisces. [ a ] It is about 32 million light-years away from Earth. [ 6 ] The galaxy contains two clearly defined spiral arms and is therefore used as an archetypal example of a grand design spiral galaxy . [ 7 ]
380 Earth radii (very inaccurate, true=16000 Earth radii) Aristarchus of Samos made a measurement of the distance of the Sun from the Earth in relation to the distance of the Moon from the Earth. The distance to the Moon was described in Earth radii (20, also inaccurate). The diameter of the Earth had been calculated previously.
This is a list of known galaxies within 3.8 megaparsecs (12.4 million light-years) of the Solar System, in ascending order of heliocentric distance, or the distance to the Sun. This encompasses about 50 major Local Group galaxies, and some that are members of neighboring galaxy groups , the M81 Group and the Centaurus A/M83 Group , and some ...
The Messier catalogue is one of the most famous lists of astronomical objects, and many objects on the list are still referenced by their Messier numbers. [1] The catalogue includes most of the astronomical deep-sky objects that can be easily observed from Earth's Northern Hemisphere; many Messier objects are popular targets for amateur ...
The French astronomer Charles Messier discovered M87 in 1781, and cataloged it as a nebula. M87 is about 16.4 million parsecs (53 million light-years) from Earth and is the second-brightest galaxy within the northern Virgo Cluster, having many satellite galaxies. Unlike a disk-shaped spiral galaxy, M87 has no distinctive dust lanes.
The last supernova that was unambiguously closer to Earth than SN 2014J was SN 2004dj, a type II-P supernova in the galaxy NGC 2403, 8 million light-years from Earth. SN 1993J was a type IIb supernova at almost the same distance as SN 2014J, because it was located in Messier 81 , which together with Messier 82 and NGC 3077 forms the core of the ...
Messier 75 is part of the Gaia Sausage, the hypothesized remains of a dwarf galaxy that merged with the Milky Way. [10] It is a halo object with an orbital period of 0.4 billion years to travel around the galaxy on a very pronounced ellipse, specifically eccentricity of 0.87. The apocenter (maximal distance from Earth) is about 57,000 ly ...
Messier 73 (M73, also known as NGC 6994) is an asterism of four stars in the constellation Aquarius which was long thought to be a small open cluster. It lies several arcminutes east of globular cluster M72. According to Gaia EDR3, the stars are 1030 ± 9, 1249 ± 10, 2170 ± 22, and 2290 ± 24 light-years from the Sun, with the second being a ...