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spiral galaxy

What is Malin 1?

One of the largest known spiral galaxies, a “low surface brightness” galaxy whose faint disc is more than seven times the Milky Way’s width.

Can you see it?

No small telescope will show you this one; it is here to be understood, not spotted.

Worth knowing about Malin 1

Anything light from there tells us is news about 1.1 billion years old.

Why it stands out
Its disc is so spread out and faint it is almost invisible in ordinary images; only special deep imaging revealed it.
Malin 1 — A model, seen from the Earth, with north up.
The numbers
Acrossabout 64,000 light-years
Distance from usabout 1.1 billion light-years
How big it looksabout 12 arcseconds — the full Moon is about 1,800

Its distance, about 1.1 billion light-years, is how long its light has been on the way, worked out from its redshift (NED, z = 0.0827) with the Planck 2018 values for the expanding universe. The 1.19 billion often quoted is a different kind of distance: how far away the galaxy is now.

The figure here is its bright inner disc, about 64,000 light-years across, measured the way every galaxy on this site is (its D25 width) so that the sizes can be compared. Its faint outer disc reaches about 650,000 light-years across, more than seven times the Milky Way.

How anyone knows this

Things like it

The Milky Wayspiral galaxyNaked eyeThe Andromeda Galaxy (M31)spiral galaxyNaked eyeThe Triangulum Galaxy (M33)spiral galaxyBinocularsBode’s Galaxy (M81)spiral galaxyBinocularsThe Whirlpool Galaxy (M51)spiral galaxy150 mm telescopeThe Sombrero Galaxy (M104)spiral galaxyBinoculars

Games it appears in

Show Malin 1 in the model📖 How the galaxies fit together🌙 Plan an evening outside