The Hubble Space Telescope’s latest image of Messier 90, a spiral galaxy in the Virgo constellation, showcases advanced technological capabilities compared to earlier photographs taken in 1994.
This new image reveals the galaxy’s bright core, dusty disc, and a gaseous halo, enhanced by the Wide Field Camera 3 installed in 2010.
The stunning spiral galaxy featured in this Hubble Space Telescope image is Messier 90 (M90, also NGC 4569), located in the constellation Virgo. In 2019, Hubble released an image of M90 (see below) using data from the older Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2) — data taken in 1994 soon after the camera’s installation. That image has a distinctive stair-step pattern due to the layout of WFPC2’s sensors. In 2010, WFPC2 was replaced by the more advanced Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3), and Hubble used WFC3 when it turned its aperture to Messier 90 again in 2019 and 2023. The resulting data was processed to create this stunning new image (above), providing a much fuller view of the galaxy’s dusty disc, its gaseous halo, and its bright core.
The inner regions of M90’s disc are sites of star formation, highlighted here by red H-alpha light from nebulae, but this is absent in the rest of the galaxy. M90 sits among the galaxies of the relatively nearby Virgo Cluster, and the course of its orbit took it on a path near the cluster’s center about three hundred million years ago. The density of gas in the inner cluster weighed on M90 like a strong headwind, stripping enormous quantities of gas from the galaxy and creating the diffuse halo that can be seen around it here. This gas is no longer available for M90 to form new stars with, and it will eventually fade as a spiral galaxy as a result.
M90 is located 55 million light-years from Earth, but it’s one of the very few galaxies getting closer to us. Its orbit through the Virgo cluster has accelerated it so much that it’s in the process of escaping the cluster entirely, and by happenstance, it’s moving in our direction — other galaxies in the Virgo cluster have been measured at similar speeds, but in the opposite direction. Over the coming billions of years, we will be treated to a yet better view of M90 while it evolves into a lenticular galaxy.