#messier 100

[quiltofstars]

The Mirror Galaxy, M100 // Greg Pomanti

[chibinotan]

Infrared Spiral

[therealuniverse]

MESSIER 100 Messier 100, aka M100 or NGC 4321, is a grand design spiral galaxy found in Coma Berenices, about 50 million light-years distant. It has a visual brightness of 9.3 mag and was discovered by Pierre Méchain in 1781. Messier 100 has prominent and well-defined spiral arms which swirl around the centre of the galaxy. The bright blue dots within the arms are high-mass stars, showing these areas are filled with star formation activity.

This image comes from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope and shows the bright core of the galaxy and the innermost parts of the spiral arms. Messier 100 has an active galactic nucleus and the brightness of its core comes from a supermassive black hole swallowing material around it; this material radiates brightly as it falls inwards. Messier 100’s spiral arms also contain smaller black holes, including the youngest ever observed in our cosmic neighbourhood; it was the result of a supernova observed in 1979. This image was taken with the high resolution channel of Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys. It has a relatively small field of view: only around 25 by 25 arcseconds. -TEL http://www.spacetelescope.org/images/potw1203a/; http://messier.seds.org/m/m100.html Image credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA

[spinningblueball]

Messier 100 and Supernova SN 2006X

[quiltofstars]

The Mirror Galaxy (M100, top left), NGC 4312 (bottom), and IC 783 (right) // KojiTajima

[quiltofstars]

The Mirror Galaxy, M100 // Michal Wierzbinski

[quiltofstars]

The Mirror Galaxy, M100 // Curtis MacDonald

[quiltofstars]

The Mirror Galaxy, M100 // Dave & Telescope