An image from the Hubble Space Telescope shows galaxy M91, a narrow spiral galaxy in the constellation Coma pyreneesis. It is relatively close to us, 55 million light-years away, and is part of our Local Supercluster.
M stands for Messier in his name, after the French astronomer Charles Messier who was famous for cataloging the astronomical objects he produced in the seventies and eighties of the eighteenth century, according to Digitartlends.
Astronomers still use the names of the objects he cataloged, from M1 to M110 to this day.
While it is undoubtedly a beautiful galaxy and shows the classic strip or bright region of dust and gas at its center where stars are formed, Hubble spotted this particular galaxy to learn about the monstrous black hole at its center.
Like nearly all galaxies including the Milky Way, M91 has a supermassive black hole at its core.
The mass of M91’s supermassive black hole was calculated using Hubble data in 2009 and found to be enormous, between 9.6 and 38 million times the mass of our Sun.
“While archival Hubble data allowed astronomers to weigh the central black hole of M91, more recent observations had other scientific goals,” the Hubble scientists said.
“This observation is part of an effort to build a treasure trove of astronomical data to explore the connections between young stars and the clouds of cold gas that form in them.
To do this the astronomers used Hubble to obtain visible and ultraviolet observations of galaxies already seen at radio wavelengths by the Atacama Large Millimeter/Submillimeter Array on Earth.
This image was collected as part of the high-angle physics of nearby galaxies using the Hubble Space Telescope, or the PHANGS-HST project.
Previous Hubble images collected for this project included spiral galaxy NGC 2835 and spiral galaxy NGC 4571.