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Messier 81 (also known as NGC 3031 or Bode's Galaxy) is a grand design spiral galaxy about 12 million light-years away in the constellation Ursa Major. It has a D 25 isophotal diameter of 29.44 kiloparsecs (96,000 light-years ).
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 approximate center of the group is located at a distance of 3.6 Mpc, making it one of the nearest groups to the Local Group. [1] The group is estimated to have a total mass of (1.03 ± 0.17) × 10 12 M ☉ . [ 2 ]
[c] The galaxy can be observed using a small telescope with a 6 cm (2.4 in) aperture, extending across an angular area of 7.2 × 6.8 arcminutes at a surface brightness of 12.9, with a very bright, 45 arcsecond core. [8] Viewing the jet is a challenge without the aid of photography. [38]
M81 is a nearly face-on spiral galaxy 11.8 million light-years from Earth. Like most spiral galaxies, it has a core made up of old stars, with arms filled with young stars and nebulae. Along with M82, it is a part of the galaxy cluster closest to the Local Group. M82 is a nearly edgewise galaxy that is interacting gravitationally with M81.
This article documents the most distant astronomical objects discovered and verified so far, and the time periods in which they were so classified. For comparisons with the light travel distance of the astronomical objects listed below, the age of the universe since the Big Bang is currently estimated as 13.787±0.020 Gyr. [1]
This is because the distance between Earth and the Sun is not fixed (it varies between 0.983 289 8912 and 1.016 710 3335 au) and, when Earth is closer to the Sun , the Sun's gravitational field is stronger and Earth is moving faster along its orbital path. As the metre is defined in terms of the second and the speed of light is constant for all ...
Pale Blue Dot, a photograph of Earth taken on February 14, 1990, by the Voyager 1 space probe from a distance of approximately 6 billion kilometers (3.7 billion miles, 40.5 AU). Earth is seen as a tiny dot within deep space: the blueish-white speck almost halfway up the rightmost band of light.