M63, the Sunflower Galaxy, is a flocculent spiral galaxy in Canes Venatici.
What It Is
M63, the Sunflower Galaxy, is a spiral galaxy in Canes Venatici. Instead of a few clean grand-design arms, it has many patchy, broken arm segments wrapped around a bright yellow core, giving it the textured look behind the Sunflower nickname.
History
Pierre Mechain discovered M63 in 1779, and Charles Messier added it to his catalog in 1781. It was the first of the objects Mechain contributed to the Messier catalog, making it an important bridge between Messier's comet-hunting list and Mechain's later deep-sky discoveries.
Science Notes
- NASA classifies M63 as a flocculent spiral galaxy, meaning its arms are fragmented rather than cleanly outlined like a grand-design spiral.
- The galaxy is about 27 million light-years away and belongs to the M51 Group, the same galaxy group as the Whirlpool Galaxy.
- Hubble images show young blue-white stars lighting the spiral-arm segments where star formation is active.
- Spitzer infrared observations trace dust through the galaxy's spiral pattern and into a ring near the dense central region.
- Deep imaging has revealed a faint stellar stream around M63, likely debris from a smaller dwarf galaxy disrupted in a past minor merger.
- distance
- ~27 million light-years
- apparentMagnitude
- +9.3
- constellation
- Canes Venatici
- objectType
- Flocculent spiral galaxy
- galaxyGroup
- M51 Group
- bestObserved
- May from mid-northern latitudes
- coordinates
- RA 13h 15m 49s, Dec +42 deg 01 min 46 sec
