NGC 4622
galaxy
NGC 4622, also known as the Backward Galaxy, is a face-on unbarred spiral galaxy with a very prominent ring structure located in the constellation Centaurus. The galaxy is a member of the Centaurus Cluster.
Spiral structure
The spiral galaxy NGC 4622 lies approximately 111 million light-years away from Earth in the constellation Centaurus. NGC 4622 is an example of a galaxy with leading spiral arms. Each spiral arm winds away from the center of the galaxy and ends at an outermost tip that "points" in a certain direction (away from the arm). Spiral arms were thought to always trail, meaning that the outermost tip of every spiral arm points away from the direction of the disk's orbital rotation. This is true of the inner spiral arm of NGC 4622 but not of its outer spiral arms. The outer arms of NGC 4622 are instead leading spiral arms, meaning the tips of the spiral arms point towards the direction of disk rotation. This may be the result of a gravitational interaction between NGC 4622 and another galaxy or the result of a merger between NGC 4622 and a smaller object.
NGC 4622 also has a single inner trailing spiral arm.
“NGC 4622” enters the record as galaxy. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what galaxy can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“NGC 4622” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, galaxy provides the most credible route into that argument.
Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 11, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q846174. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
A concise general-reference account can conceal disagreements about scope, terminology or the weight assigned to individual sources. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “NGC 4622” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.