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The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image features the spiral galaxy NGC 3285B, a member of the Hydra I cluster of galaxies.ESA/Hubble & NASA, R. J. Foley (UC Santa Cruz) The swirling spiral galaxy in this NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image is NGC 3285B, which resides 137 million light-years away in the constellation Hydra (the Water Snake). Hydra has the largest area of the 88 constellations that cover the entire sky in a celestial patchwork. It’s also the longest constellation, stretching 100 degrees across the sky. It would take nearly 200 full moons, placed side by side, to reach from one side of the constellation to the other.
NGC 3285B is a member of the Hydra I cluster, one of the largest galaxy clusters in the nearby universe. Galaxy clusters are collections of hundreds to thousands of galaxies bound to one another by gravity. The Hydra I cluster is anchored by two giant elliptical galaxies at its center. Each of these galaxies is about 150,000 light-years across, making them about 50% larger than our home galaxy, the Milky Way.
NGC 3285B sits on the outskirts of its home cluster, far from the massive galaxies at the center. This galaxy drew Hubble’s attention because it hosted a Type Ia supernova in 2023. Type Ia supernovae happen when a type of condensed stellar core called a white dwarf detonates, igniting a sudden burst of nuclear fusion that briefly shines about 5 billion times brighter than the Sun. The supernova, named SN 2023xqm, is visible here as a blueish dot on the left edge of the galaxy’s disk.
Hubble observed NGC 3285B as part of an observing program that targeted 100 Type Ia supernovae. By viewing each of these supernovae in ultraviolet, optical, and near-infrared light, researchers aim to disentangle the effects of distance and dust, both of which can make a supernova appear redder than it actually is. This program will help refine cosmic distance measurements that rely on observations of Type Ia supernovae.
Text credit: ESA/Hubble
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Explore Hubble Hubble Home Overview About Hubble The History of Hubble Hubble Timeline Why Have a Telescope in Space? Hubble by the Numbers At the Museum FAQs Impact & Benefits Hubble’s Impact & Benefits Science Impacts Cultural Impact Technology Benefits Impact on Human Spaceflight Astro Community Impacts Science Hubble Science Science Themes Science Highlights Science Behind Discoveries Hubble’s Partners in Science Universe Uncovered Hubble and Artificial Intelligence Explore the Night Sky Observatory Hubble Observatory Hubble Design Mission Operations Missions to Hubble Hubble vs Webb Team Hubble Team Career Aspirations Hubble Astronauts Multimedia Images Videos Sonifications Podcasts e-Books Online Activities 3D Hubble Models Lithographs Fact Sheets Posters Hubble on the NASA App Glossary News Hubble News Social Media Media Resources More 35th Anniversary Online Activities 2 min read
Hubble Spies Swirling Spiral
The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image features the spiral galaxy NGC 3285B, a member of the Hydra I cluster of galaxies. ESA/Hubble & NASA, R. J. Foley (UC Santa Cruz) The swirling spiral galaxy in this NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image is NGC 3285B, which resides 137 million light-years away in the constellation Hydra (the Water Snake). Hydra has the largest area of the 88 constellations that cover the entire sky in a celestial patchwork. It’s also the longest constellation, stretching 100 degrees across the sky. It would take nearly 200 full Moons, placed side by side, to reach from one side of the constellation to the other.
NGC 3285B is a member of the Hydra I cluster, one of the largest galaxy clusters in the nearby universe. Galaxy clusters are collections of hundreds to thousands of galaxies bound to one another by gravity. The Hydra I cluster is anchored by two giant elliptical galaxies at its center. Each of these galaxies is about 150,000 light-years across, making them about 50% larger than our home galaxy, the Milky Way.
NGC 3285B sits on the outskirts of its home cluster, far from the massive galaxies at the center. This galaxy drew Hubble’s attention because it hosted a Type Ia supernova in 2023. Type Ia supernovae happen when a type of condensed stellar core called a white dwarf detonates, igniting a sudden burst of nuclear fusion that briefly shines about 5 billion times brighter than the Sun. The supernova, named SN 2023xqm, is visible here as a blueish dot on the left edge of the galaxy’s disk.
Hubble observed NGC 3285B as part of an observing program that targeted 100 Type Ia supernovae. By viewing each of these supernovae in ultraviolet, optical, and near-infrared light, researchers aim to disentangle the effects of distance and dust, both of which can make a supernova appear redder than it actually is. This program will help refine cosmic distance measurements that rely on observations of Type Ia supernovae.
Text Credit: ESA/Hubble
Facebook logo @NASAHubble @NASAHubble Instagram logo @NASAHubble Media Contact:
Claire Andreoli (claire.andreoli@nasa.gov)
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD
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Last Updated Jul 24, 2025 Editor Andrea Gianopoulos Location NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Related Terms
Hubble Space Telescope Astrophysics Astrophysics Division Galaxies Goddard Space Flight Center Spiral Galaxies The Universe Keep Exploring Discover More Topics From Hubble
Hubble Space Telescope
Since its 1990 launch, the Hubble Space Telescope has changed our fundamental understanding of the universe.
Hubble’s Night Sky Challenge
Hubble’s Galaxies
Reshaping Our Cosmic View: Hubble Science Highlights
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By NASA
Explore Hubble Hubble Home Overview About Hubble The History of Hubble Hubble Timeline Why Have a Telescope in Space? Hubble by the Numbers At the Museum FAQs Impact & Benefits Hubble’s Impact & Benefits Science Impacts Cultural Impact Technology Benefits Impact on Human Spaceflight Astro Community Impacts Science Hubble Science Science Themes Science Highlights Science Behind Discoveries Hubble’s Partners in Science Universe Uncovered Hubble and Artificial Intelligence Explore the Night Sky Observatory Hubble Observatory Hubble Design Mission Operations Missions to Hubble Hubble vs Webb Team Hubble Team Career Aspirations Hubble Astronauts Multimedia Images Videos Sonifications Podcasts e-Books Online Activities 3D Hubble Models Lithographs Fact Sheets Posters Hubble on the NASA App Glossary News Hubble News Social Media Media Resources More 35th Anniversary Online Activities 6 Min Read NASA’s Hubble, Chandra Spot Rare Type of Black Hole Eating a Star
NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory team up to identify a possible intermediate-mass black hole. Credits:
NASA, ESA, CXC, Yi-Chi Chang (National Tsing Hua University); Image Processing: Joseph DePasquale (STScI) NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory have teamed up to identify a new possible example of a rare class of black holes. Called NGC 6099 HLX-1, this bright X-ray source seems to reside in a compact star cluster in a giant elliptical galaxy.
Just a few years after its 1990 launch, Hubble discovered that galaxies throughout the universe can contain supermassive black holes at their centers weighing millions or billions of times the mass of our Sun. In addition, galaxies also contain as many as millions of small black holes weighing less than 100 times the mass of the Sun. These form when massive stars reach the end of their lives.
Far more elusive are intermediate-mass black holes (IMBHs), weighing between a few hundred to a few 100,000 times the mass of our Sun. This not-too-big, not-too-small category of black holes is often invisible to us because IMBHs don’t gobble as much gas and stars as the supermassive ones, which would emit powerful radiation. They have to be caught in the act of foraging in order to be found. When they occasionally devour a hapless bypassing star — in what astronomers call a tidal disruption event— they pour out a gusher of radiation.
The newest probable IMBH, caught snacking in telescope data, is located on the galaxy NGC 6099’s outskirts at approximately 40,000 light-years from the galaxy’s center, as described in a new study in the Astrophysical Journal. The galaxy is located about 450 million light-years away in the constellation Hercules.
A Hubble Space Telescope image of a pair of galaxies: NGC 6099 (lower left) and NGC 6098 (upper right). The purple blob depicts X-ray emission from a compact star cluster. The X-rays are produced by an intermediate-mass black hole tearing apart a star. Science: NASA, ESA, CXC, Yi-Chi Chang (National Tsing Hua University); Image Processing: Joseph DePasquale (STScI) Astronomers first saw an unusual source of X-rays in an image taken by Chandra in 2009. They then followed its evolution with ESA’s XMM-Newton space observatory.
“X-ray sources with such extreme luminosity are rare outside galaxy nuclei and can serve as a key probe for identifying elusive IMBHs. They represent a crucial missing link in black hole evolution between stellar mass and supermassive black holes,” said lead author Yi-Chi Chang of the National Tsing Hua University, Hsinchu, Taiwan.
X-ray emission coming from NGC 6099 HLX-1 has a temperature of 3 million degrees, consistent with a tidal disruption event. Hubble found evidence for a small cluster of stars around the black hole. This cluster would give the black hole a lot to feast on, because the stars are so closely crammed together that they are just a few light-months apart (about 500 billion miles).
The suspected IMBH reached maximum brightness in 2012 and then continued declining to 2023. The optical and X-ray observations over the period do not overlap, so this complicates the interpretation. The black hole may have ripped apart a captured star, creating a plasma disk that displays variability, or it may have formed a disk that flickers as gas plummets toward the black hole.
“If the IMBH is eating a star, how long does it take to swallow the star’s gas? In 2009, HLX-1 was fairly bright. Then in 2012, it was about 100 times brighter. And then it went down again,” said study co-author Roberto Soria of the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF). “So now we need to wait and see if it’s flaring multiple times, or there was a beginning, there was peak, and now it’s just going to go down all the way until it disappears.”
The IMBH is on the outskirts of the host galaxy, NGC 6099, about 40,000 light-years from the galaxy’s center. There is presumably a supermassive black hole at the galaxy’s core, which is currently quiescent and not devouring a star.
Black Hole Building Blocks
The team emphasizes that doing a survey of IMBHs can reveal how the larger supermassive black holes form in the first place. There are two alternative theories. One is that IMBHs are the seeds for building up even larger black holes by coalescing together, since big galaxies grow by taking in smaller galaxies. The black hole in the middle of a galaxy grows as well during these mergers. Hubble observations uncovered a proportional relationship: the more massive the galaxy, the bigger the black hole. The emerging picture with this new discovery is that galaxies could have “satellite IMBHs” that orbit in a galaxy’s halo but don’t always fall to the center.
Another theory is that the gas clouds in the middle of dark-matter halos in the early universe don’t make stars first, but just collapse directly into a supermassive black hole. NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope’s discovery of very distant black holes being disproportionately more massive relative to their host galaxy tends to support this idea.
However, there could be an observational bias toward the detection of extremely massive black holes in the distant universe, because those of smaller size are too faint to be seen. In reality, there could be more variety out there in how our dynamic universe constructs black holes. Supermassive black holes collapsing inside dark-matter halos might simply grow in a different way from those living in dwarf galaxies where black-hole accretion might be the favored growth mechanism.
“So if we are lucky, we’re going to find more free-floating black holes suddenly becoming X-ray bright because of a tidal disruption event. If we can do a statistical study, this will tell us how many of these IMBHs there are, how often they disrupt a star, how bigger galaxies have grown by assembling smaller galaxies.” said Soria.
The challenge is that Chandra and XMM-Newton only look at a small fraction of the sky, so they don’t often find new tidal disruption events, in which black holes are consuming stars. The Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile, an all-sky survey telescope from the U.S. National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy, could detect these events in optical light as far as hundreds of millions of light-years away. Follow-up observations with Hubble and Webb can reveal the star cluster around the black hole.
The Hubble Space Telescope has been operating for more than three decades and continues to make ground-breaking discoveries that shape our fundamental understanding of the universe. Hubble is a project of international cooperation between NASA and ESA (European Space Agency). NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, manages the telescope and mission operations. Lockheed Martin Space, based in Denver, also supports mission operations at Goddard. The Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, conducts Hubble science operations for NASA.
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NGC 6099 (Hubble + Chandra)
A Hubble Space Telescope image of a pair of galaxies: NGC 6099 (lower left) and NGC 6098 (upper right). The purple blob depicts X-ray emission from a compact star cluster. The X-rays are produced by an intermediate-mass black hole tearing apart a star.
NGC 6099 (Hubble)
A Hubble Space Telescope image of a pair of galaxies: NGC 6099 (lower left) and NGC 6098 (upper right). The white dot labeled HLX-1 is the visible-light component of the location of a compact star cluster where an intermediate-mass black hole is tearing apart a star.
NGC 6099 Compass Image
This compass image shows two elliptical galaxies, NGC 6098 at upper right and NGC 6099 at lower left. The fuzzy purple blob at bottom center shows X-ray emission produced by an intermediate-mass black hole tearing apart a star.
HLX-1 Illustration
This sequence of artistic illustrations, from upper left to bottom right, shows how a black hole in the core of a star cluster captures a bypassing star and gravitationally shreds it until there is an explosion, seen in the outskirts of the host galaxy.
HLX-1 Animation
This video is an illustration of an intermediate-mass black hole capturing and gravitationally shredding a star. It begins by zooming into a pair of galaxies. The galaxy at lower left, NGC 6099, contain a dense star cluster at center. The video then zooms into the heart of the cl…
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Last Updated Jul 24, 2025 Editor Andrea Gianopoulos Location NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Contact Media Claire Andreoli
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center
Greenbelt, Maryland
claire.andreoli@nasa.gov
Ray Villard
Space Telescope Science Institute
Baltimore, Maryland
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Related Links and Documents
Chinese translation of release Science Paper: Multiwavelength Study of a Hyperluminous X-Ray Source near NGC6099: A Strong IMBH Candidate, PDF (1.81 MB)
Keep Exploring Discover More Topics From Hubble
Hubble Space Telescope
Since its 1990 launch, the Hubble Space Telescope has changed our fundamental understanding of the universe.
Reshaping Our Cosmic View: Hubble Science Highlights
Hubble Black Holes
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By NASA
This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image features the galaxy cluster Abell 209.ESA/Hubble & NASA, M. Postman, P. Kelly A massive, spacetime-warping cluster of galaxies is the setting of today’s NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image. The galaxy cluster in question is Abell 209, located 2.8 billion light-years away in the constellation Cetus (the Whale).
This Hubble image of Abell 209 shows more than a hundred galaxies, but there’s more to this cluster than even Hubble’s discerning eye can see. Abell 209’s galaxies are separated by millions of light-years, and the seemingly empty space between the galaxies is filled with hot, diffuse gas that is visible only at X-ray wavelengths. An even more elusive occupant of this galaxy cluster is dark matter: a form of matter that does not interact with light. Dark matter does not absorb, reflect, or emit light, effectively making it invisible to us. Astronomers detect dark matter by its gravitational influence on normal matter. Astronomers surmise that the universe is comprised of 5% normal matter, 25% dark matter, and 70% dark energy.
Hubble observations, like the ones used to create this image, can help astronomers answer fundamental questions about our universe, including mysteries surrounding dark matter and dark energy. These investigations leverage the immense mass of a galaxy cluster, which can bend the fabric of spacetime itself and create warped and magnified images of background galaxies and stars in a process called gravitational lensing.
While this image lacks the dramatic rings that gravitational lensing can sometimes create, Abell 209 still shows subtle signs of lensing at work, in the form of streaky, slightly curved galaxies within the cluster’s golden glow. By measuring the distortion of these galaxies, astronomers can map the distribution of mass within the cluster, illuminating the underlying cloud of dark matter. This information, which Hubble’s fine resolution and sensitive instruments help to provide, is critical for testing theories of how our universe evolved.
Text Credit: ESA/Hubble
Image credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, M. Postman, P. Kelly
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By NASA
Explore Hubble Hubble Home Overview About Hubble The History of Hubble Hubble Timeline Why Have a Telescope in Space? Hubble by the Numbers At the Museum FAQs Impact & Benefits Hubble’s Impact & Benefits Science Impacts Cultural Impact Technology Benefits Impact on Human Spaceflight Astro Community Impacts Science Hubble Science Science Themes Science Highlights Science Behind Discoveries Hubble’s Partners in Science Universe Uncovered Hubble and Artificial Intelligence Explore the Night Sky Observatory Hubble Observatory Hubble Design Mission Operations Missions to Hubble Hubble vs Webb Team Hubble Team Career Aspirations Hubble Astronauts Multimedia Images Videos Sonifications Podcasts e-Books Online Activities 3D Hubble Models Lithographs Fact Sheets Posters Hubble on the NASA App Glossary News Hubble News Social Media Media Resources More 35th Anniversary Online Activities 2 min read
Hubble Digs Up Galactic Time Capsule
This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image features the globular cluster NGC 1786. ESA/Hubble & NASA, M. Monelli; Acknowledgment: M. H. Özsaraç This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image features the field of stars that is NGC 1786. This globular cluster is located in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), a small satellite galaxy of the Milky Way Galaxy that is approximately 160,000 light-years away from Earth. NGC 1786 itself is in the constellation Dorado. It was discovered in the year 1835 by Sir John Herschel.
The data for this image comes from an observing program that compares old globular clusters in nearby dwarf galaxies — the LMC, the Small Magellanic Cloud, and the Fornax dwarf spheroidal galaxy — to globular clusters in the Milky Way galaxy. Our galaxy contains over 150 of these old, spherical collections of tightly-bound stars, which astronomers have studied in depth — especially with Hubble images like this one, which show them in previously unattainable detail. Being very stable and long-lived, globular clusters act as galactic time capsules, preserving stars from the earliest stages of a galaxy’s formation.
Astronomers once thought that stars in a globular cluster all formed together at about the same time, but the study of old globular clusters in our galaxy uncovered multiple populations of stars with different ages. To use globular clusters as historical markers, we must understand how they form and where these stars of varying ages come from. This observing program examined old globular clusters like NGC 1786 in these external galaxies to see if they, too, contain multiple populations of stars. This research can tell us more about how the LMC originally formed, but also the Milky Way Galaxy, too.
Text Credit: ESA/Hubble
Facebook logo @NASAHubble @NASAHubble Instagram logo @NASAHubble Media Contact:
Claire Andreoli (claire.andreoli@nasa.gov)
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD
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Last Updated Jul 17, 2025 Editor Andrea Gianopoulos Location NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Related Terms
Astrophysics Astrophysics Division Globular Clusters Goddard Space Flight Center Hubble Space Telescope Star Clusters Stars The Universe Keep Exploring Discover More Topics From Hubble
Hubble Space Telescope
Since its 1990 launch, the Hubble Space Telescope has changed our fundamental understanding of the universe.
Hubble’s Star Clusters
Science Behind the Discoveries
Hubble’s Night Sky Challenge
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