Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
Charles Messier (French: [ʃaʁl me.sje]; 26 June 1730 – 12 April 1817) was a French astronomer. He published an astronomical catalogue consisting of 110 nebulae and star clusters , which came to be known as the Messier objects , referred to with the letter M and their number between 1 and 110.
Charles Messier. The first edition of 1774 covered 45 objects (M1 to M45).The total list published by Messier in 1781 contained 103 objects, but the list was expanded through successive additions by other astronomers, motivated by notes in Messier's and Méchain's texts indicating that at least one of them knew of the additional objects.
Messier 65 (also known as NGC 3623) is an intermediate spiral galaxy about 35 million light-years away in the constellation Leo, within its highly equatorial southern half. It was discovered by Charles Messier in 1780. With M66 and NGC 3628, it forms the Leo Triplet, a small close group of galaxies.
The Whirlpool Galaxy, also known as Messier 51a (M51a) or NGC 5194, is an interacting grand-design spiral galaxy with a Seyfert 2 active galactic nucleus. [ 6 ] [ 7 ] [ 8 ] It lies in the constellation Canes Venatici , and was the first galaxy to be classified as a spiral galaxy. [ 9 ]
The Messier Catalogue was a list of astronomical objects compiled by Charles Messier between 1771 and 1781, in which he briefly described each object and provided their coordinates on the sky. Because Messier was only interested in finding comets, he created this list of non-comet objects that frustrated his hunt for them.
The French astronomer Charles Messier discovered M87 in 1781, and cataloged it as a nebula. M87 is about 16.4 million parsecs (53 million light-years) from Earth and is the second-brightest galaxy within the northern Virgo Cluster, having many satellite galaxies. Unlike a disk-shaped spiral galaxy, M87 has no distinctive dust lanes.
Messier 60 was the fastest-moving galaxy included in Edwin Hubble's landmark 1929 paper concerning the relationship between recession speed and distance. [19] He used a value of 1090 km/s for the recession speed, 1.8% less than the more recent value of about 1110 km/s (based on a redshift of 0.003726).
Messier 63 or M63, also known as NGC 5055 or the seldom-used Sunflower Galaxy, [6] is a spiral galaxy in the northern constellation of Canes Venatici with approximately 400 billion stars. [7] M63 was first discovered by the French astronomer Pierre Méchain , then later verified by his colleague Charles Messier on 14 June 1779. [ 6 ]