This photo from the Hubble Space Telescope presents the Messier 85 galaxy. It lives at a distance of 50 million light years from Earth in the constellation Volonika Hair. For the first time in 1781, her colleague Charles Messier, Pierre Meschen, noticed her.
M85 is intriguing to scientists, since the characteristics of the galaxy lie between the lenticular and elliptical types. It also seems to be in contact with two neighbors: the beautiful spiral NGC 4394 (outside the frame on the upper left) and the small elliptical MCG 3-32-38 (below). The Messier Galaxy 85 contains 400 billion stars, most of which are already ancient. But in the central area you can find relatively young stars with an age of just a billion years. It is believed that they appeared during the last explosion of stellar birth, caused by the merging of M85 with another galaxy 4 billion years ago. It is believed that inside each galaxy there must be a supermassive black hole, but in M85 its presence has not yet been confirmed.
The picture combines infrared, visible and ultraviolet observations on a wide-angle Hubble camera 3.
