Both bright and oriented edge-on to our line of sight, NGC 5907 is sometimes called the Splinter Galaxy or the Knife Edge Galaxy.
The edge-on galaxy NGC 5907 in Draco offers one of the best galaxies in the sky that is aligned this way to our line of sight. Credit: KPNO/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/Adam Block
Perhaps 100 billion galaxies exist in the universe at this time, although the cosmos could be infinite and the number even larger. Of the huge number of galaxies, several thousand are bright enough to be viewed nicely with a small or medium-sized backyard telescope. And of course the orientations of galaxies in space are all over the place — only a handful of galaxies are really bright in our sky and oriented almost exactly edge-on to our line of sight.
One of these edge-on marvels is NGC 5907 in Draco. It is an SA(s)c galaxy, sometimes called the Splinter Galaxy or the Knife Edge Galaxy. It lies a short distance away from M102 (NGC 5866), a smaller galaxy that is also, coincidentally, oriented almost exactly edge-on.
NGC 5907 is relatively large and bright, shining at magnitude 11.1 and spanning 12.7’ by 1.4’. It lies approximately 53.5 million light-years away.
This galaxy is a prototypical “warped spiral.” In 2006 a team of astronomers announced the detection of an extensive tidal stream of material surrounding the galaxy, with evidence of a warp in the disk.
NGC 5907 has an anomalously low metallicity and a small number of giant stars. This galaxy is almost entirely composed of dwarf stars, and its star formation is pretty dormant.
The galaxy has produced one supernova on record: SN 1940A, which peaked at magnitude 14.3.
