Wolf-Lundmark-Melotte (WLM)

RA:

00 : 02.0

Dec:

-15 : 28

Type:

Ir +, IB(s) IV-V

RV:

-42 km/s

Distance:

3400 kly

Apparent Dimension:

12 x 4 '

Diameter:

8 kly

Brightness:

10.9 m_vis

Absolute Mag:

-14.7

Mass:

?

Its discovery occurred just a year too late to be included in the second IC catalog (IC II) which had appeared in 1908.

The distance of WLM is given at discordant values in recent compilations. While the ESO press release gives a distance which, corrected for the refined Cepheid distance scale by the Hipparcos satellite, is our adopted distance of 3.4 million light years; this is intermediate between the distances of Irwin (1998), van den Bergh (2000) and Mateo (1999), who gave values, refined for the Hipparcos data, of 3430, 3405 and 3375 kly, respectively. A previous estimate had pushed it out to 4.2 million light-years, and the database of Ferrarese et.al. (1999) gives a value of 17.8 times the distance of the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), or about 3180 kly.

ESO Press Release Image.

• Full ESO Press Release 11/96.
• Original ESO Press Photo 34/96

Image of the WLM Local Group dwarf galaxy, as observed with the CTIO Blanco 4-m telescope and Mosaic II camera as part of the NOAO-sponsored Local Group Survey headed by Philip Massey of Lowell Observatory. The image is a true-color combination of images in three of the filters used by the survey.