NGC 4845 is a dusty spiral galaxy located in the constellation Virgo, approximately 65 million light-years from Earth.
Seen nearly edge-on, the galaxy displays a prominent central bulge intersected by a dense, dark dust lane, highlighting the rich structure of its disk. The galaxy spans about 4.2 arcminutes across, which corresponds to a true diameter of roughly 80,000 light-years — slightly smaller than the Milky Way.
One particularly interesting feature in this image is a faint, diffuse structure extending upward from the nucleus, roughly perpendicular to the galactic plane. Its alignment and morphology suggest it may be ejecta or outflow material, possibly tied to past or ongoing activity from the supermassive black hole at the galaxy’s center.
That same black hole made headlines in 2011 when it produced a powerful X-ray flare, likely caused by the tidal disruption of a small object, such as a brown dwarf. Observations from ESA’s INTEGRAL and NASA’s Swift satellites captured the flare in real time — one of the rare instances where a feeding event was directly observed
Imaged in LRGB on my Planewave CDK 1000 at Observatorio El Sauce, Chile.
Image acquisition and processing: Mike Selby