Spiral Galaxy M96 from Hubble

Dust lanes seem to swirl around the core of Messier 96 in this colorful, detailed portrait of the center of a beautiful island universe.

Of course M96 is a Galaxy, and counting the faint arms extending beyond the brighter central region, it spans 100 thousand light-years or so, making it about the size of our own Milky Way.

M96, also known as NGC 3368, is known to be about 35 million light-years distant and a dominant member of the Leo I galaxy group.

The featured image was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope.

The reason for M96’s asymmetry is unclear — it could have arisen from gravitational interactions with other Leo I galaxy group galaxies, but the lack of an intra-group diffuse glow seems to indicate few recent interactions.

Galaxies far in the background can be found by examining the edges of the picture.

APOD in other languages: Arabic, Catalan, Chinese (Beijing), Chinese (Taiwan), Croatian, Czech, Dutch, Farsi, French, French, German, Hebrew, Indonesian, Japanese, Korean, Montenegrin, Polish, Russian, Serbian, Slovenian, Spanish and Ukrainian