What is the Pinwheel Galaxy?

The Pinwheel Galaxy is a spiral galaxy with about 1 trillion stars located in the Ursa Major constellation. The galaxy has well-defined spiral arms and dust lanes extending all the way around the body of the galaxy. The Pinwheel was discovered in 1781 by astronomer Pierre Méchain and was communicated to Charles Messier who verified its position. He has described it as a “nebula without a star”, very obscure and pretty large, 6′ to 7′ in diameter, between the left hand of Bootes and the tail of the Great Bear.” The galaxy is about 70% larger than the Milky Way Galaxy or over twice its diameter. It is roughly 27 million light years away and spanning over 170,000 light years, Messier 101 is one of the biggest disc galaxies known so far. Shining with the light of about 30 billion suns, the Pinwheel galaxy is known as one of the most prominent Grand Design spiral galaxies in the sky – even if it is just a little lopsided, lopsided enough that Halton Arp has included M101 as No. 26 in his Catalogue of Peculiar Galaxies as a “Spiral with One Heavy Arm”.

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