Big Galaxy, Medium Black Hole

The barred-spiral galaxy NGC 3319 spins through Ursa Major, the Great Bear. It's about 47 million light-years from Earth, and it's a little smaller than our home galaxy, the Milky Way. NGC 3319 may contain an intermediate-mass black hole -- one of only a few discovered to date. The black hole appears to be about 30,000 to 100,000 times the mass of the Sun. Hot gas spiraling into the black hole produces X-rays, which is how the possible black hole was discovered. [Sloan Digital Sky Survey]