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.
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Messier 85Messier 85 ist eine elliptische Galaxie vom Hubble-Typ E-S0 im Sternbild Haar der Berenike. Sie ist schätzungsweise 50 Millionen Lichtjahre von der Milchstraße entfernt, hat einen Scheibendurchmesser von etwa 105.000 Lj und ist Mitglied des Virgo-Galaxienhaufens. .. weiterlesen