Hubble Picture of the week

This atmospheric image shows a galaxy named Messier 85, captured in all its delicate and fuzzy glory by the NASA / ESA Hubble Space Telescope. Messier 85 crosses the constellation of Coma Berenices (Berenice's hair) and is about 50 million light-years away from Earth. Discovered for the first time by Charles Messier's colleague, Pierre Méchain, in 1781, it is part of the Messier catalog of celestial objects.

Messier 85 intriguing – its properties are somewhere between those of a lenticular galaxy and an elliptical galaxy, and it seems to interact with two of its neighbors: the beautiful spiral NGC 4394, located outside the frame at the top left, and the small elliptical MCG 3-32-38, located outside the frame, at the bottom center.

The galaxy contains some 400 billion stars, most of which are very old. However, the central region is home to a relatively young population of stars, only a few billion years old; These stars are thought to have formed in a late explosion of star formation, possibly caused by the merger of Messier 85 with another galaxy over four billion years ago. Messier 85 presents another potentially strange quality. It is thought that almost all galaxies have a supermbadive black hole in its center, but according to the measurements of the speed of the stars in this galaxy, it is difficult to know if Messier 85 contains such a black hole.

This image combines the infrared, visible and ultraviolet observations of Hubble's wide-field camera 3.

Credit: ESA / Hubble & NASA, R. O'Connell