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NGC 2997
Sign in to saveAlso known as New General Catalogue 2997
spiral galaxy in the constellation Antlia
In the Vinony graph
Within Vinony's link graph, NGC 2997 is referenced by 324 other articles, and connects out to light-year, Antlia and epoch.
It sits within the topics Antlia, Astronomical objects discovered in 1793 and Discoveries by William Herschel.
Its subject is documented across 38 Wikipedia language editions.
Key facts
- Constellation
- Antlia
- Right ascension
- 09 45 38.75379
- Declination
- −31 ° 11 ′ 27.3570 ″
- Heliocentric radial velocity
- 1,088 ± 2 km/s
- Distance
- 39.8 megalight-years (12.2 Mpc)
- Group or cluster
- NGC 2997 group
- Type
- SAB(rs)c or Sc(s)I.3
- Size
- 120,000 ly (36.65 kpc ) (estimated)
- Apparent size v
- 8′.9 × 6′.8
via Wikipedia infobox
Wikidata facts
- Constellation
- Antlia
- Distance from Earth
- 7
- Image
- NGC 2997 ESO.jpg
Show 11 more facts
- catalog code
- Gaia DR2 5440216477189745152
- Commons category
- NGC 2997
- time of discovery or invention
- 1793-03-04
- discoverer or inventor
- William Herschel
- redshift
- 0.003626
- apparent magnitude
- 6.412
- galaxy morphological type
- SAB(rs)c
- right ascension
- 146.41147414564300
- declination
- -31.19093250771130
- radial velocity
- 1081
- epoch
- J2000.0
Sources (1)
via Wikidata · CC0
~2 min read
Encyclopedic overview
NGC 2997 is a face-on unbarred spiral galaxy about 40 million light-years away in the faint southern constellation of Antlia. It was discovered March 4, 1793 by German-born astronomer William Herschel. J. L. E. Dreyer described it as, "a remarkable object, very faint, very large, very gradually then very suddenly bright middle and 4 arcsec nucleus. This is the brightest galaxy of the NGC 2997 group of galaxies, and was featured on the cover of the first edition of Galactic Dynamics by James Binney and Scott Tremaine.
This is a grand-design galaxy with a symmetrical, two-armed form. The morphological classification of NGC 2997 is SAB(rs)c, indicating a weakly-barred spiral galaxy (SAB) with an incomplete ring around the bar (rs) and loosely-wound spiral arms (c). It is inclined at an angle of 40° to the line of sight from the Earth, with the major axis aligned along a position angle of 110°. The arms host a series of dusty knots that are star-forming regions being generated through gas compression from density waves. At the core, the arms converge to form a circumnuclear ring with symmetrically-placed hot spots containing super star clusters.
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “NGC 2997” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.