A Spiral Galaxy Whose Arms Refuse to Reach the Middle

Hubble's image of NGC 4698 shows a spiral galaxy with the usual furniture: delicate arms threaded with opaque brown dust and dotted with small clusters of bright blue stars. What is odd is where those arms live. In many spirals, the arms wind all the way down to the luminous core. In NGC 4698 they are prominent only in the outer reaches of the disk, hovering in a ring-like structure around the galaxy's perimeter instead. The photograph is credited to ESA/Hubble and NASA, with D. Thilker and the MAUVE-HST team.