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Messier 77

This majestic spiral galaxy has an intensely active core.

Distance

45 million light-years

Apparent Magnitude

9.6

constellation

Cetus

object type

Spiral Galaxy

A close-up, face-on view of a spiral galaxy. Its center glows brightly. Spiral arms emerge from the galaxy’s core and wind through the round disk of the galaxy. You can spot these arms by their dark-red dust lanes and dots of brightly-shining, pink spots where stars are forming. Some faint stars are visible around the galaxy, as well as a particularly bright foreground star near the lower-left corner of the image.
ESA/Hubble & NASA, L. C. Ho, D. Thilker

Initially identified as a nebula by the French astronomer Pierre Méchain in 1780. Both Messier and Méchain were comet hunters who cataloged nebulous objects that could be mistaken for comets. Messier, Méchain, and other astronomers of their time mistook the M77 for either a spiral nebula or a star cluster. This mischaracterization isn’t surprising. More than a century would pass between the discovery of M77 and the realization that the ‘spiral nebulae’ scattered across the sky were not part of our galaxy but were in fact separate galaxies millions of light-years away.

M77 is one of the largest galaxies in the Messier catalog. It is located in the constellation Cetus at a distance of 45 million light-years from Earth. M77 has an apparent magnitude of 9.6 and is visible in a small telescope. It is most easily observed during December.

M77
This Hubble image of M77 is from 2013.
NASA, ESA & A. van der Hoeven
core of M77
This ultraviolet image from Hubble probes the bright, active core of M77. Brightness fluctuations in this region imply that an enormous amount of energy is being released from a hidden source in the galaxy’s nucleus. The most likely candidate is a supermassive black hole.
NASA, ESA

Hubble has captured this vivid image of M77’s center using visible and infrared observations. The streaks of red and blue in the image highlight pockets of star formation along the pinwheeling arms, with dark dust lanes wrapping around the galaxy’s starry center.

M77 is a prime example of a Seyfert galaxy, or a galaxy with an intensely active center that is obscured by gas and dust in visible light.

For more information about Hubble’s observations of M77, see:

locator star chart for M77
This star chart for M77 represents the view from mid-northern latitudes for the given month and time.
Image courtesy of Stellarium
locator star chart for M77
This star chart for M77 represents the view from mid-southern latitudes for the given month and time.
Image courtesy of Stellarium

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