#m94

La preciosa galaxia espiral M94

La galaxia espiral M94 se encuentra a tan sólo 15 millones de años luz de distancia en la constelación septentrional de perros de caza, Canes Venatici. Es una galaxia de 30.000 años luz de diámetro, pequeña en comparación con la nuestra que tiene 100.000 años luz. M94. Imagen del telescopio espacial Hubble. Pueden observarse otras pequeñas galaxias a su alrededor. Tradicionalmente, las imágenes…

Random Messier object - M94 - Cat's Eye Galaxy

M94 is a spiral galaxy 16 million light years from Earth in the constellation of Canes Venatici. It's a number of notable features, one being that 25% of the galaxies mass falls in an outer halo around the galaxy.

The inner spiral section appears to have a diamond ring around it, although this is the boundary where huge amounts of star formation are occurring, making blue giants that clustered together look like diamonds. The structure is very much attached to the spiral flow, so isn't a ring, but appears to be because of the environment found at that distance from the galactic centre, more favourable to star formation.

The yellowish colour of the centre is due to the age of the stars, older more long lasting stars like our own Sun, that can make it into billions of years, and have the time to migrate from their original birth locations further out.

M94 - Face-on Spiral Galaxy

M94 is one of the closer galaxies to the Milky Way at "just" 15 million light years from us, and so a member of our local community of galaxies. The face on angle allows astronomers to study in detail how the galaxy is behaving, with particular interest in the inner bright supermassive black hole region with it's dust lanes and creamy appearance, and the contrast with the outer arms that look encrusted with diamonds.

What's really happening here is the centre of the galaxy is a very active black hole region, making this galaxy what is termed a Seyfert galaxy, one that has large quantities of gas and dust at the centre, being actively consumed by the supermassive black hole and therefore generating a large amount of radiation and activity.

This can account for the central region looking creamy in colour, which is the star-light from longer lived stars (yellow, orange, red) while the outer regions show an intense amount of star birth, with the biggest and brightest of these being the very young blue giants, which look like diamonds.

The star birth towards the centre is stunted by the incredibly active central region, yet, gas and dust can still be seen clearly making its way to the central regions through this area.

It's likely the galaxy has had a large injection of gas and dust in the last billion years, and while we cannot say if that is related to intergalactic gas/dust or a merger of some kind, we do get to have a face-on show of the ramifications for this.