Key facts
- Constellation
- Virgo
- Right ascension
- 12 48 35.9
- Declination
- −05 ° 48 ′ 03 ″
- Redshift
- 1241 ± 1 km/ s
- Distance
- ~ 38 Mly / ~ 50 Mly
- Type
- E6
- Apparent size v
- 4.4 ′ × 2.8 ′
via Wikipedia infobox
~2 min read
Encyclopedic overview
NGC 4697 (also known as Caldwell 52) is an elliptical galaxy some 40 to 50 million light-years away in the constellation Virgo. It is a member of the NGC 4697 Group, a group of galaxies also containing NGC 4731 and several generally much smaller galaxies. This group is about 55 million light-years away; it is one of the many Virgo II Groups, which form a southern extension of the Virgo Supercluster of galaxies.
The distance to NGC 4697 is not known with high precision: measurements vary from 28 to 76 million light-years. According to the NASA Extra-galactic Database, the average is about 38 million light-years; according to SIMBAD, about 50 million light-years.
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “Q729053” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.