This pretty little galaxy is known as NGC 4526. Its dark bands of dust and diffuse, bright glow make the galaxy appear to be hanging like a halo in the void of space in this new space telescope image NASA/ESA Hubble.

Although this image paints a picture of serenity, the galaxy is anything but. It is one of the brightest lenticular galaxies known, a category that falls somewhere between spirals and ellipticals. It has hosted two known supernova explosions, one in 1969 and another in 1994, and is known to have at its center a colossal supermassive black hole that has the mass of 450 million Suns.

NGC 4526 is part of the Virgo galaxy cluster. Ground-based observations of galaxies in this cluster have revealed that a quarter of these galaxies appear to have rapidly rotating disks of gas at their centers. The most spectacular of these is this galaxy, NGC 4526, whose rotating disk of gas, dust and stars extends a unique distance from its core, spanning about 7% of the total radius of the Galaxy.

This disk moves incredibly fast, spinning at over 250 kilometers per second. The dynamics of this rapidly swirling region were actually used to infer the mass of NGC 4526's central black hole – a technique that had not previously been used to constrain a galaxy's central black hole.

This image was taken using Hubble's Wide Field Planetary Camera 2.

A version of this image was entered into Hubble's Hidden Treasures image processing competition by entrant Judy Schmidt. Hidden Treasures was an initiative to invite astronomy enthusiasts to search the Hubble archives for stunning images that have never been seen by the general public.

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Credit:
ESA/Hubble and NASA

Thanks: Judy Schmidt

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