The end of the week means a new Hubble image, and this one shows a spectacular spiral galaxy called IC 4709, located about 240 million light-years away.

This image shows its faint halo, filled with stars and dust lanes, and its rotating galactic disc. The bright, compact region at its centre hosts an active galactic nucleus with a black hole 65 million times more massive than our Sun.

Image description:

A spiral galaxy with a bright white nucleus, a glowing disk filled with swirling patterns of dark dust, and a faint halo around the disk. It is on a black background surrounded by several small, distant galaxies and some foreground stars.

 

Image credits: ESA/Hubble & NASA, M. Koss, A, Barth

This is what comes to my mind when I think of a galaxy. What do you think of?