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Messier 98 is an intermediate
spiral galaxyA spiral galaxy is a certain kind of galaxy originally described by Edwin Hubble in his 1936 work The Realm of the Nebulae and, as such, forms part of the Hubble sequence. Spiral galaxies consist of a flat, rotating disk containing stars, gas and dust, and a central concentration of stars known as...
about
60 millionTo help compare different orders of magnitude, this page lists distances starting at 100 Zm .Distances shorter than 100 Zm* 140 Zm — 15 million light years — Distance to Centaurus A galaxy...
light-yearA light-year, also light year or lightyear is a unit of length, equal to just under 10 trillion kilometres...
s away in the
constellationIn modern astronomy, a constellation is an internationally defined area of the celestial sphere. These areas are grouped around asterisms, patterns formed by prominent stars within apparent proximity to one another on Earth's night sky....
Coma BerenicesComa Berenices is a traditional asterism that has since been defined as one of the 88 modern constellations. It is located near Leo, to which it formerly belonged, and accommodates the North Galactic Pole...
. It was discovered by
Pierre MéchainPierre François André Méchain was a French astronomer and surveyor who, with Charles Messier, was a major contributor to the early study of deep sky objects and comets.-Life:...
on March 15, 1781 along with
M99Messier 99 is an unbarred spiral galaxy approximately 50 million light-years away in the constellation Coma Berenices....
and
M100Messier 100 is an example of a grand design spiral galaxy located within the southern part of constellation Coma Berenices. It is one of the brightest galaxies in the Virgo cluster, approximately 55 million light-years distant from Earth and has a diameter of 160,000 light years...
and was cataloged as a Messier object on April 13, 1781. Messier 98 has a
blue shiftA blueshift is any decrease in wavelength ; the opposite effect is referred to as redshift. In visible light, this shifts the colour from the red end of the spectrum to the blue end...
and is approaching us at about 140 km per second.
Virgo Cluster membership
Messier 98 is a member of the
Virgo ClusterThe Virgo Cluster is a cluster of galaxies whose center is 53.8 ± 0.3 Mly away in the constellation Virgo. Comprising approximately 1300 member galaxies, the cluster forms the heart of the larger Local Supercluster, of which the Local Group is an outlying member...
, which is a large, relatively nearby cluster of galaxies.
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