A new composite image from Hubble and Webb puts a familiar spiral back in the frame, and the strangest thing about it is the way its gas spins in two directions at once.
The Black Eye Galaxy is famous for its dark dust lane. That is not the interesting part. On June 12, 2026, NASA released a new composite image of Messier 64 that captures the spiral at near- and mid-infrared wavelengths with the James Webb Space Telescope, layered over Hubble's ultraviolet, visible, and near-infrared view. The image is not a discovery. It is a sharper look at a known oddity, and the oddity is the way the galaxy's gas moves.
M64's defining feature is its counter-rotating gas. According to the same NASA image-feature page, the gas in the outer regions of the spiral rotates in the opposite direction from the gas and stars in the inner regions. Most spirals settle into a single rotational pattern over time. M64 never did, and the mismatch is the kind of detail that turns a pretty image into a working puzzle.
NASA frames the counter-rotation as the likely relic of a past merger: somewhere in the galaxy's history, more than a billion years ago by the space agency's description, M64 absorbed a satellite galaxy, and the smaller object's gas ended up orbiting in the opposite direction from the host. The composite image, taken on March 20, 2026 and published this week, is built to show both reservoirs at once. Webb's infrared layers see through dust to stellar populations Hubble's optical view cannot reach, and the dark lane that gives the galaxy its nickname begins to read as the boundary between the two kinematic systems rather than a simple shadow.
What the new picture does not settle is what the merger actually did. The merger hypothesis explains the counter-rotation, but it leaves open how the dark lane formed, how the two gas reservoirs have avoided mixing for a billion years, and what the geometry implies for the galaxy's dark matter halo. M64 sits close enough to study in detail, and the combination of Hubble and Webb now gives astronomers a way to map stars, gas, and dust in the same frame. Whether the dark matter distribution carries a signature of the ancient collision is the question the new image makes newly tractable.
The image credit lists teams from the European Southern Observatory, the Space Telescope Science Institute, The Ohio State University, and The Johns Hopkins University, which is a reasonable signal that the underlying observations will feed a longer analysis. Processing credit goes to Gladys Kober at NASA and the Catholic University of America. The Hubble Messier catalog entry for Messier 64 is the natural next stop for the historical record. And the open question, as the new composite frames it, is not what the Black Eye Galaxy looks like. It is what the merger that built the galaxy left behind.