Today’s space picture comes from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope.

Galaxy NGC 1097 is about 50 million light-years away. The spiral galaxy has at its core a black hole (press release).

It is, says NASA, “a wild creature of the dark”:

The black hole is huge, about 100 million times the mass of our sun, and is feeding off gas and dust along with the occasional unlucky star. Our Milky Way’s central black hole is tame by comparison, with a mass of a few million suns.

The odd blue intruder in the top right is a companion galaxy that “could have plunged through, poking a hole” says George Helou, deputy director of the Spitzer Science Center at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. “But we don’t know this for sure. It could also just happen to be aligned with a gap in the arms.”

Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech