Links
- Editorial guides
- Wikipedia
- NGC 4395 on Wikipedia
- Preset views
NGC 4395
Details
The black hole in NGC 4395 powers an active galactic nucleus inside a small bulgeless galaxy. Its existence helped show that a galaxy does not need a large central bulge to host a feeding central black hole.
NGC 4395 matters because it breaks the idea that a feeding central black hole needs a big bulge-dominated galaxy. It is a small, unusual galaxy, yet it still hosts an active nucleus. That makes the black hole here scientifically important far beyond the galaxy’s size.
What makes NGC 4395 especially revealing is the mismatch between the galaxy and the expectation. It is a Seyfert galaxy, but it does not have the kind of prominent central bulge people often associate with a galaxy capable of sustaining an active central black hole. And yet the nucleus is active anyway. That means the path to building and feeding a central black hole is more flexible than a simple galaxy template would suggest.
That is why NGC 4395 matters on this scale. It helps connect the world of familiar galactic centers to the murkier middle ground of smaller black holes and smaller host systems. NGC 4395 is important because it shows that central black holes are not reserved only for the biggest, most architecturally obvious galactic cores.
22,657km
Visual creditscaleofspace.org / CC BY-NC 4.0
Key facts
- Category
- Black holes
- Object class
- Intermediate-mass black hole
- Host
- NGC 4395
- Scale fact
- 61,000 kmevent horizon diameter
- Mass
- ~10,000 solar masses
Scale context
Where NGC 4395 sits on the full axis
Shared physical scale
254billion km
Together, these objects make the size change around NGC 4395 easy to compare at a glance.
Between the smallest and the largest, perspective is everything.
About
Scale of Space is a scroll-based journey through the universe, placing objects on a single logarithmic scale so you can compare size across an unbroken range.
Guides turn parts of that scale into curated essays, while focused views let you explore the same range through specific groups of objects.