Dust Lanes in Messier 84’s Core

Messier 84 (M84) is an elliptical galaxy 60 million light years away in the Virgo constellation. It’s one of the prominent galaxies in the famous sub-cluster, Markarian’s Chain.

Elliptical galaxies are typically amorphous blobs of many billions of older stars. They generally contain very little free gas and dust—the kind of thing that fuels star formation in spiral and other types of galaxies. But in 1985, Hansen, Norgaard-Nielsen, and Jorgensen, H. E. published a study of a dark lane of gas and dust they had discovered in the core of M84—a rather unusual finding.

Since then, the Hubble Space Telescope team has published some very detailed images of this phenomenon:

I didn’t initially set out to take a picture of these dust lanes. But I did spend considerable time over the course of two years shooting M84 as part of a larger image of Markarian’s Chain in the Virgo Galaxy Cluster. In that image, the core of M84 is extremely bright and washes out anything like this dust lane that may be there. But by processing M84 separately and controlling the dynamic range appropriately, I was able to uncover it—at least to some degree.

It’s still very faint, but it’s there. There’s no way I can match the results of the Hubble Space Telescope using a small earthbound refractor. But given the constraints, I feel like capturing it at all is a small victory and worthy of adding to my portfolio.