M89 (Galaxy)
An elliptical galaxy in Virgo that looks perfectly round: its catalogued outline is 8.1 by 8.0 arcminutes. Deep images show shells and plumes around it, perhaps from smaller galaxies it swallowed.
Galaxy in Virgo. Magnitude 10.1.
Can you see it from Guyana?
From Georgetown (6.8° N) it climbs to 84° above the northern horizon at its highest; from Lethem (3.4° N), to 81° above the northern horizon. It is highest at midnight on the night of 29 Mar, in the middle of its season. The page works out tonight's rise, highest point and set for both towns in Guyana time (UTC-4), and where the Moon is.
What you'll see
- Your eyes: Not visible to the eye. It lies 6.7° west of Vindemiatrix.
- 10x50 binoculars: Just detectable in binoculars from a dark site, as a faint smudge. M90 is 0.7° away.
- A small telescope (80 to 100 mm): A small, perfectly round glow with a bright centre; M90 is 0.7° to the north-east.
- A camera: Tiny on camera: it needs 2,000 mm or more of focal length on a tracking mount.
How big, how bright, how far
- Size on the sky: 8.1′ × 8′, 26% of the Moon's width (the Moon is about 31′ wide).
- Brightness: magnitude 10.1. Fainter than the faintest stars in Georgetown (4.3) and Lethem (6.0): binoculars or a telescope.
- Distance: 50 million light-years. The light reaching your eye left it about 50 million years ago.
- True size: 120,000 light-years across its catalogued outline; light crosses it in 120,000 years.
Apparent size from OpenNGC (Mattia Verga), CC-BY-SA-4.0.
What it is made of
- Type
- Elliptical galaxy
- Notable
- Surrounded by shells and plumes, perhaps from past mergers, and jets that reach 100,000 light-years out: it may once have been far more active.
What is in it, not measured:
- Old stars: mostly old, yellow and red
- Very little cold gas or dust
- Dark matter: inferred from how its stars move
How we know: Distance from the median of 47 published estimates by several methods (no two direct ones agree to combine): NED-D (NASA/IPAC Extragalactic Database, redshift-independent distances), median of 47 estimates: 15.90 Mpc, 13.94-17.10 Mpc (16th-84th percentile); e.g. 2013AJ....146...86T, 2010ApJ...717..603V, 2009ApJ...694..556B; retrieved 2026-10-21. True size: the apparent size times the distance (apparent size: OpenNGC (Mattia Verga, CC BY-SA 4.0), commit 4e2398a2).
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More deep-sky objects: M90 (Galaxy) · M58 (Galaxy) · Virgo Galaxy (M87) · M59 (Galaxy) · M91 (Galaxy) · M88 (Galaxy)