Pinwheel Galaxy
Galaxy in the constellation Ursa Major / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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The Pinwheel Galaxy (also known as Messier 101, M101 or NGC 5457) is a face-on spiral galaxy located 21 million light-years (6.4 megaparsecs)[5] from Earth in the constellation Ursa Major. It was discovered by Pierre Méchain in 1781[lower-alpha 1] and was communicated that year to Charles Messier, who verified its position for inclusion in the Messier Catalogue as one of its final entries.
Pinwheel Galaxy | |
---|---|
Observation data (J2000 epoch) | |
Constellation | Ursa Major |
Right ascension | 14h 03m 12.6s |
Declination | +54° 20′ 57″ |
Redshift | 0.000804 |
Heliocentric radial velocity | 241 ± 2 km/s |
Distance | 20.9 ± 1.8 Mly (6.4 ± 0.5 Mpc) |
Apparent magnitude (V) | 7.9[1] |
Characteristics | |
Type | SAB(rs)cd |
Number of stars | 1 trillion (1012) |
Size | 51.91 kpc (169,300 ly) (diameter; 25.0 mag/arcsec2 B-band isophote)[2][3] |
Apparent size (V) | 28′.8 × 26′.9 |
Other designations | |
Messier 101, M101, NGC 5457, UGC 8981, PGC 50063, Arp 26 | |
On February 28, 2006, NASA and the European Space Agency released a very detailed image of the Pinwheel Galaxy, which was the largest and most-detailed image of a galaxy by Hubble Space Telescope at the time.[10] The image was composed of 51 individual exposures, plus some extra ground-based photos.