Hubble's Breathtaking View of Galaxy Messier 61

The luminous heart of the galaxy M61 dominates this image, framed by its winding spiral arms threaded with dark tendrils of dust. This particular astronomical image incorporates data from not only Hubble, but also the Focal Reducer and Spectrograph 2 camera at the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope, together revealing M61 in unprecedented detail.

Messier 61 (also known as M61 or NGC 4303) is an intermediate barred spiral galaxy in the Virgo Cluster of galaxies. It was first discovered by Barnaba Oriani on May 5, 1779.Messier had observed it on the same night as Oriani but had mistaken it for a comet. Its distance has been estimated to be 45.61 million light years from the Milky Way Galaxy.

It has an active galactic nucleus and is classified as a starburst galaxy containing a massive nuclear star cluster with an estimated mass of 105 solar masses and an age of 4 million years, as well as a central candidate supermassive black hole weighing around 5×106 M☉ solar masses.

Image credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, ESO, J. Lee and the PHANGS-HST Team

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