Markarian 187 as seen by Hubble

Rings of brilliant blue stars encircle the bright, active core of this spiral galaxy. Called Markarian 817, it lies 430 million light-years away in the northern constellation of Draco. Away from the centre, the galaxy shows intense star-forming regions and dark bands of interstellar dust along its spiral arms.

The monster black hole at the centre of this galaxy is forty million times more massive than the Sun. It is surrounded by a huge disc of matter encircling the supermassive black hole, which is blasting material into space at millions of kilometres per hour. This is seen in the bright white light shining from the galactic centre.

This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image was taken with the Wide Field Camera 3 on 2 August
2009. It was originally published on esahubble.org on 9 September 2009.

[Image description: Image of a spiral galaxy seen face-on. The galactic centre is lit up brightly in white, around which lies a ring of purple stars and outside that several spiral arms in blue. The background is black with several other galaxies visible.]