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