Chandra’s Fresh Take on Messier 94 Shows a Bright Inner Ring

Sixteen million light-years away, in the constellation Canes Venatici, sits a spiral galaxy that refuses to look ordinary. NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory recently delivered a composite view of Messier 94, also catalogued as NGC 4736, that layers high-energy X-rays over a ground-based optical photograph. The result shows a bright central region wrapped in a tight ring of intense star formation, with the whole structure set against a softer outer disk that stretches farther than early observers realized.

X-rays detected by Chandra illuminate the galaxy in all of its brilliance, with brilliant reds, oranges, and blues where heated gas cools to millions of degrees. Those electrifying colors appear on top of a more recognizable scene, constructed by amateur astronomers Brian Brennan and Remi Lacasse with a typical red, green, and blue color scheme. When combined, the galaxy’s inner ring is very striking. That ring is more than just an adornment; a chunk of gas swirling inward is directed along an oval-shaped path, where it accumulates and piles high before shattering into intense explosions of stars. These newborn stars are only a few million years old, and they are what cause the flash of activity we see today, known as a starburst ring, which is where the majority of the galaxy’s star formation occurs.

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Messier 94 is a monster of a galaxy, measuring almost 50,000 light-years wide in its main body, with fainter outlying portions stretching it out slightly. Its core shines brilliantly, a bit of an anomaly, as they’ve classified it as a LINER, which is basically a region where incredibly old stars produce a lot of light, and at the center of it all is a supermassive black hole with a mind-boggling 16 million times the mass of our Sun. That black hole in the center has an oval-shaped partner, similar to a cosmic pump, which drives material into the starburst ring and accelerates star formation. Beyond that, as you move outwards towards the edges, the light dims dramatically before picking up again in a flatter zone that was formerly assumed to be a second ring altogether. Later, when scientists looked at it in other wavelengths, they discovered that it was simply the outer spiral arms that appear to form a ring from our perspective.

Pierre Méchain first discovered this galaxy in March 1781, and two days later Charles Messier added it to his famous list. For centuries, this was just this dazzling tiny compact spiral, and it appeared to be any other spiral at the time, but as you go deeper, you can see the outer arms and the very surprising way that star formation is just happening on the outskirts. It gets even more interesting when you consider that a portion of the outer disk comprises a solid 23% of the galaxy’s total mass but still produces 10% of all new stars, and it does so at a significantly higher rate than the interior parts.