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Uncommon galaxy 24 EP

NGC 4955

RA 196.5201° · Dec -29.7543° · openngc

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Score breakdown

· 3 badges
24 pts · Uncommon
Uncommon 34 pts → Rare
  • Galaxy +14
  • Outside our galaxy entirely +6
  • Elliptical galaxy +4
Total score 24

10 more points to reach Rare.

Badges

  • Galaxy · +14
  • Outside our galaxy entirely · +6
  • Elliptical galaxy · +4

Trivia

What it actually is

  • What it actually is. A galaxy: a gravitationally bound city of stars, gas and dark matter, turning so slowly that a single rotation takes hundreds of millions of years.
  • Elliptical. An elliptical galaxy: a smooth swarm of stars on randomly tilted orbits, with almost no cold gas left to build anything new.

Sense of scale

  • In perspective. Deep in the extragalactic distance — further than the entire Virgo Cluster of galaxies.
  • Scale. Home to hundreds of billions of stars — a universe unto itself, and every one of those points of light could have planets.

Find it in the sky

  • How to spot it. At magnitude 12.2 it is far too faint for the eye: this one belongs to cameras and long exposures, over in Hydra.
  • Southern sky. It rides the southern half of the sky — an easier target the further south you are.
  • Best time of year. It stands highest in the middle of the night around April — that's when to go looking.

Could we get there?

  • Verdict. Impossible with our current technology — and the next millennium of it.

Properties

constellation
Hya
dist ly
161028223.966
dso type
G
hubble
E
mag
12.15
name
NGC 4955
radial velocity kms
3436
redshift
0.0115
size arcmin
2.34
surface brightness
23.87

About NGC 4955

NGC 4955 is an uncommon galaxy. It lies about 161,028,224 light-years from Earth, sits in the constellation Hya and shines at apparent magnitude 12.15.

A galaxy: a gravitationally bound city of stars, gas and dark matter, turning so slowly that a single rotation takes hundreds of millions of years.

How to see it

Look for NGC 4955 in the constellation Hya. At apparent magnitude 12.15, it takes a larger telescope or a long-exposure image to capture.

Like any astronomical target, NGC 4955 is best seen from a dark site away from city lights, and when it is above the horizon depends on your latitude and the time of year. The visibility panel above works out tonight's viewing window for your saved location.

Why NGC 4955 is an uncommon galaxy

NGC 4955 scores 24 points on Spacedle's rarity scale, which places it in the uncommon tier. Another 10 points would lift it into a rarer tier.

That score comes from 3 science badges — Galaxy, Outside our galaxy entirely and Elliptical galaxy — each earned for a real, measurable property of the object. Rarity on Spacedle is never random: the more remarkable an object's astrophysics, the more badges it collects, the higher it scores, and the rarer it ranks.