Messier85 - HST - Potw1905a
The darkness within?
This atmospheric image shows a galaxy named Messier 85, captured in all its delicate, hazy glory by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. Messier 85 slants through the constellation of Coma Berenices (Berenice’s Hair), and lies around 50 million light-years from Earth. It was first discovered by Charles Messier’s colleague Pierre Méchain in 1781, and is included in the Messier catalogue of celestial objects.
Messier 85 is intriguing — its properties lie somewhere between those of a lenticular and an elliptical galaxy, and it appears to be interacting with two of its neighbours: the beautiful spiral NGC 4394, located out of frame to the upper left, and the small elliptical MCG 3-32-38, located out of frame to the centre bottom.
The galaxy contains some 400 billion stars, most of which are very old. However, the central region hosts a population of relatively young stars of just a few billion years in age; these stars are thought to have formed in a late burst of star formation, likely triggered as Messier 85 merged with another galaxy over four billion years ago. Messier 85 has a further potentially strange quality. Almost every galaxy is thought to have a supermassive black hole at its centre, but from measurements of the velocities of stars in this galaxy, it is unclear whether Messier 85 contains such a black hole.
This image combines infrared, visible and ultraviolet observations from Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3.
Credit:
ESA/Hubble & NASA, R. O'Connell
Coordinates Position (RA): 12 25 24.00 Position (Dec): 18° 11' 16.55" Field of view: 2.55 x 2.69 arcminutes Orientation: North is 0.1° right of vertical
Colours & filters Band Wavelength Telescope Optical u 336 nm Hubble Space Telescope WFC3 Optical B 438 nm Hubble Space Telescope WFC3 Optical V 555 nm Hubble Space Telescope WFC3 Optical I 814 nm Hubble Space Telescope WFC3.
![]() ![]() |
ESA/Hubble images, videos and web texts are released by the ESA under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license and may on a non-exclusive basis be reproduced without fee provided they are clearly and visibly credited. Detailed conditions are below; see the ESA copyright statement for full information. For images created by NASA or on the hubblesite.org website, or for ESA/Hubble images on the esahubble.org site before 2009, use the {{PD-Hubble}} tag.
Conditions:
Notes:
|
- Wolno:
- dzielić się – kopiować, rozpowszechniać, odtwarzać i wykonywać utwór
- modyfikować – tworzyć utwory zależne
- Na następujących warunkach:
- uznanie autorstwa – musisz określić autorstwo utworu, podać link do licencji, a także wskazać czy utwór został zmieniony. Możesz to zrobić w każdy rozsądny sposób, o ile nie będzie to sugerować, że licencjodawca popiera Ciebie lub Twoje użycie utworu.
Więcej informacji o licencji można znaleźć tutaj. Ostatnia aktualizacja: Thu, 25 Aug 2022 07:33:03 GMT