WISE

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA

Observation • May 25th, 2011

Some astronomers call the grand design spiral Messier 74 the "perfect spiral," for its exceptional symmetry. It is suspected to have a black hole at its center, with a mass equal to 10,000 suns. It is one of only a handful of known black holes with masses intermediate between the relatively smaller ones that form from collapsing stars and the supermassive black holes millions of times more massive than the sun. Supermassive black holes are more typically found at the centers of galaxies. Messier 74 is located between 24.5 and 36 million light-years away in the constellation Pisces, and is 100,000 light-years across.