This week’s picture from the Hubble Area Telescope exhibits the galaxy M91, a barred spiral galaxy within the constellation of Coma Berenices. It’s comparatively close by to us, at 55 million light-years away, and it’s a part of our native supercluster. The M in its identify stands for Messier, after the French astronomer Charles Messier who is legendary for his catalog of astronomical objects he produced within the 1770s and 1780s. The designations of the objects he cataloged, from M1 to M110, are nonetheless utilized by astronomers right this moment.
Whereas it’s undeniably a good-looking galaxy and exhibits the traditional bar or brilliant area of mud and fuel at its heart the place stars are shaped, this explicit galaxy was noticed by Hubble in an effort to be taught concerning the monstrous black gap at its heart. Like nearly all galaxies, together with the Milky Means, M91 has a supermassive black gap at its coronary heart. The mass of M91’s supermassive black gap was calculated utilizing Hubble information in 2009 and located to be monumental, at between 9.6 and 38 million occasions the mass of our Solar.
“Whereas archival Hubble information allowed astronomers to weigh M91’s central black gap, newer observations have had different scientific goals,” Hubble scientists write. “This commentary is a part of an effort to construct a treasure trove of astronomical information exploring the connections between younger stars and the clouds of chilly fuel through which they type. To do that, astronomers used Hubble to acquire ultraviolet and visual observations of galaxies already seen at radio wavelengths by the ground-based Atacama Massive Millimeter/submillimeter Array.”
This picture was collected as a part of the Physics at Excessive Angular decision in Close by GalaxieS with the Hubble Area Telescope, or PHANGS-HST mission. Earlier Hubble photos collected for this mission embody the spiral galaxy NGC 2835 and the spiral galaxy NGC 4571.
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