WISE

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA

Observation • December 14th, 2010

This galaxy does not have a spiral disk, just a bulge, making it a massive elliptical galaxy. M60 is about 20 percent larger than the Milky Way Galaxy, and lies in the Virgo cluster of galaxies. The brighter dense spot inside but off-center from the blue core of M60 is a separate spiral galaxy called NGC 4647. In visible light, M60 is much brighter than NGC 4647. However, in the longest infrared wavelengths that WISE sees, the opposite is true. Recent evidence suggests there is a black hole at the center of M60 with a mass of about 4.5 billion times that of the Sun, making it one of the largest black holes known. Two more galaxies are near the upper left corner of this panel, NGC 4638 (the brighter one) and NGC 4637. In addition, two different asteroids were caught crossing the field of view when WISE imaged this portion of the sky (dotted green lines extending out from M60 at about the 2 oclock and 8 oclock positions).