Hubble snaps a faraway galaxy that contains supermassive black hole

A new image captured by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope shows a spiral galaxy M91 that lies approximately 55 million light-years from Earth.

The barred spiral galaxy is located in the constellation Coma Berenices and also hides an astronomical monstrosity. It contains a supermassive black hole at its centre that weighs somewhere between 9.6 and 38 million times as much as the Sun.

The image was acquired using Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3 which can observe ultraviolet, visible, and near-infrared light.

Sharing the image, the European Space Agency stated that this observation is part of an effort to build a treasure trove of astronomical data exploring the connections between young stars and the clouds of cold gas in which they form. To do this, astronomers used Hubble to obtain ultraviolet and visible observations of galaxies already seen at radio wavelengths by the ground-based Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA).

📷 This NASA/ESA @HUBBLE_space Telescope image shows the barred spiral galaxy M91 which, like our own Milky Way galaxy, contains a supermassive black hole at its centre 👉 https://t.co/4aplBl0hkl pic.twitter.com/T5R5P7ht9n

— ESA (@esa) April 11, 2022

Hubble is one of NASA's longest-living and most valuable space-based observatories. Deployed by the space shuttle Discovery in 1990, the observatory has made more than 1.5 million observations over the course of its lifetime.