Quoted from SEDS:
Discovered by Pierre Méchain in 1781.
Messier 95 (M95, NGC 3351) is a beautiful barred spiral galaxy
situated in constellation Leo, and one of the fainter Messier Objects.
Pierre Méchain discovered M95, together with
M96, March 20,
1781. Consequently,
Charles
Messier included it in
his
catalog on March 24, 1781.
M95 is a barred spiral of type SBb, or SB(r)ab according to de
Vaucouleurs' classification, with nearly circular arms. Alan Sandage, in
the Hubble Atlas of Galaxies, calls it a "typical ringed galaxy".
Its overall appearance is quite similar to
M91 except that
M95 has more pronounced spiral structure.
M95 is a member of the
Leo I or M96
group, which also contains M96,
M105 and a number
of fainter galaxies.
Barred spiral galaxy M95 was one of the galaxies in the key project
of the Hubble
Space Telescope for the determination of the Hubble constant: the
HST was employed to look for Cepheid variables and thereby determine
this galaxy's distance. A preliminary result has been obtained and
published in 1996-97 by the HST H0 Key Project Team
(paper VII, 1997). Their result, corrected for the semi-recent
adjustment of the Cepheid brightness zero point by ESA's Hipparcos
astrometrical satellite, is a distance of 35.5+-3.1 million light years.
This is in semi-good agreement with the value of about 41 million light
years (after correction for Hipparcos results) which had been obtained
earlier by Nial R. Tanvir
for its neighbor M96,
and implies a distance of all the galaxies in the Leo I group of about
38 million light years. |
