 This beautiful galaxy is tilted on an oblique angle, giving us a bird's eye view of this grand design spiral galaxy. It is similar to our Milky Way, but this favorable view provides a better picture of the typical architecture of spiral galaxies. The spiral arms, which wind all the way down into the nucleus, are made up of young, blueish, hot stars formed in the past few million years. A number of sinuous dust lanes also wind all the way into the nucleus of M81. A black hole of 70 million solar masses resides at the center. This is about 15 times the mass of the Milky Way's black hole. Elbow research shows that the size of the central black hole in a galaxy is proportional to the mass of the galaxy's bulge.