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Messier 101

Spiral Galaxy M101 (NGC 5457), type Sc, in Ursa Major

Pinwheel Galaxy

[m101.jpg]
Right Ascension 14 : 03.2 (h:m)
Declination +54 : 21 (deg:m)
Distance 24000 (kly)
Visual Brightness 7.9 (mag)
Apparent Dimension 22.0 (arc min)

Discovered by Pierre Méchain in 1781.

Messier 101 (M101, NGC 5457) was discovered by Pierre Méchain on March 27, 1781, and added as one of the last entries in Charles Messier's catalog. It was one of the first "spiral nebula" identified as such, in 1851 by William Parsons, the third Earl of Rosse.

Although extended 22 arc minutes on photos and quite bright, only the central region of this galaxy is visible in smaller telescopes, best at low powers. Suggestions of the spiral arms can be glimpsed in telescopes starting from 4 inch as nebulous patches. Several of these patches (i.e., spiral arm fragments) were assigned their own catalog numbers by William Herschel and later observers; according to the NGC and Burnham, there are 9 such numbers, 3 of which go back to Herschel who has found them on April 14, 1789, while the RNGC states that five of the others don't exist (ne); it mentions however that deVaucouleurs has them as knots: NGC 5447 (H III.787), 5449 (ne), 5450 (ne), 5451 (ne), 5453 (ne), 5455, 5458 (ne), 5461 (H III.788), 5462 (H III.789), and 5471.

On photographs, however, the Pinwheel Galaxy M101 is revealed as one of the most prominent Grand Design spirals in the sky. While quite symmetric visually and in very short exposures which show only the central region, it is of remarkable unsymmetry, its core being considerably displaced from the center of the disk. Halton Arp has included M101 as No. 26 in his Catalogue of Peculiar Galaxies as a "Spiral with One Heavy Arm".

M101 is the brightest of a group of at least 9 galaxies, called the M101 Group. The brightest companions are NGC 5474 (type Sc, 10.85 mag vis) to the SSE and NGC 5585 (Sa, 11.49 mag; Glyn Jones and Burnham misprinted this as 5485) to the NE. Other probable group members are NGC 5204 (Ir, 11.26), NGC 5238 (SB(d)m, 13.35p), NGC 5477 (Ir+, 13.8), UGC 8508 (Ir+, 14.5 p), Holmberg IV (UGC 8837, Ir+, 13.1 p), and UGC 9405.

The distance of M101 has been determined by the measurement of Cepheid variables with the Hubble Space Telescope in 1994/95 to be about 24 +/- 2 million light years, by the HST H0 Key Project Team (paper III, 1996). Kenneth Glyn Jones mentions earlier Earth-bound attempts of 1986, when two Cepheids were claimed to have been detected (yielding distance estimates between 20 and 26 million light years). It is also in good agreement with a distance determined from the Planetary Nebula Luminosity function, by Feldmeier, Ciardullo and Jacoby (1996) which is 25.1 +/- 1.6 million light years. Later it was suspected that according to the recent recalibration of the Cepheid distance scale, the "true" distance of M101 could be 10 percent higher and we had longly used a value of 27 million light years. Modern value has been refined to 24 Mly again (e.g. NED), which we now adopt here. The work to adjust this webpage is still in progress.

At the new distance from the HST and Hipparcos, it has a linear diameter of over 170,000 light years and is thus among the biggest disk galaxies, and its total apparent visual brightness of 7.9 mag corresponds to an absolute brightness of -21.6 magnitudes, or a luminosity of about 30 billion (3*10^10) times that of our sun.

Four supernovae have been discovered in M101:

Another supernova candidate has been discovered in 2015, but turned out to be probably a Luminous Red Nova (LNR): Two more probable extragalactic novae, SPIRITS15mo and SPIRITS15mn, have been discovered in M101 on July 1, 2015. SPIRITS15mo reached mag 17.7, SPIRITS15mn mag 18.7. These two had been found in the infrared in data collected by the Spitzer Space Telescope (SST) within the Spitzer InfraRed Intensive Transients Survey (SPIRITS).

  • Historical Observations and Descriptions of M101
  • More images of M101
  • NOAO images of M101 (KPNO, WIYN)
  • UIT UV image of M101 from the Astro-2 Space Shuttle mission (STS-67)
  • GALEX images of M101 in UV
  • Amateur images of M101; more amateur images (Wallis/Provin)

    For a long time, it had been one of two common views that M102 may have been an erroneous re-observation of M101, a view backed by a disclaimer of the discovery by its discoverer, Pierre Méchain. However. there is good historical evidence to doubt this view: Perhaps more probably, M102 could be NGC 5866.

  • Multispectral Image Collection of M101, SIRTF Multiwavelength Messier Museum
  • SIMBAD Data of M101
  • NED Data of M101 - distances
  • Publications on M101 (NASA ADS)
  • Observing Reports for M101 (IAAC Netastrocatalog)
  • NGC Online data for M101

    References



    Hartmut Frommert
    Christine Kronberg
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    Last Modification: April 4, 2016