NGC 3938
NGC 3938 is an unbarred spiral galaxy in the Ursa Major constellation. It was discovered by German-British astronomer William Herschel on 6 February 1788. It is one of the brightest spiral galaxies in the Ursa Major South galaxy group and is roughly 76,000 light years in diameter. It is approximately 41.4 million light years away from Earth. NGC 3938 is classified as type Sc under the Hubble sequence, a loosely wound spiral galaxy with a smaller and dimmer bulge. The spiral arms of the galaxy contain many areas of ionized atomic hydrogen gas, more so towards the center.
NGC 3938 is a member of the NGC 4111 Group, which is part of the Ursa Major Cloud and is the second largest group in the cloud after the NGC 3992 Group.
Supernovae and Luminous Red Nova
Five supernovae have been identified within NGC 3938:- SN 1961U was discovered by Paul Wild on 28 December 1961.
- SN 1964L was discovered by Paul Wild on 11 December 1964.
- SN 2005ay was discovered by Doug Rich on 27 March 2005.
- SN 2017ein was discovered by Ron Arbour on 25 May 2017 and peaked at magnitude 14.9. Images taken before the explosion point to a progenitor mass between ~47-48, if it was in a single star system, and ~60-80, if it was in a binary star system.
- SN 2022xlp was discovered by Kōichi Itagaki on 13 October 2022.
- AT 2022ckk was discovered by the Automatic Learning for the Rapid Classification of Events on 13 February 2022.