The galaxy hosts a
supermassive black hole with estimated mass 26.9 ± 20.4 millions
M⊙, based on velocity dispersion. A nuclear dust ring has been detected in NGC 4494, based on observations by the
Hubble Space Telescope. It has semimajor axis 0.6 arcseconds, which corresponds to 60 parsec at the distance of NGC 4494. Its ring is symmetric, implying that the dust has settled in this galaxy, after the
galaxy merger with a relatively gas rich galaxy that led to its creation. The core of NGC 4494 is kinematically decoupled, as with many elliptical galaxies, probably a result of a galaxy merger.
Dark matter In observations by
XMM-Newton observatory, the galaxy was quite faint in
X-rays, nearly two orders of magnitude fainter than galaxies with similar optical luminosities. This fact has been attributed to lack of
dark matter and hot gas of the galaxy. The amount of dark matter existing in the
halo of NGC 4494 has been debated. The galaxy is characterised as "naked" by Romanowsky et al., Napolitano et al. found that the dark matter halo has unexpectedly low central density and the analysis by Deason et al. revealed an unusually low dark matter fraction, 0.32 ± 0.12 at 5Re. Rodionov and
Athanassoula tried to set strict constraint to the halo mass, but with only partial success. On the other hand, Morganti et al. found the dark matter fraction to be about 0.6 ± 0.1 at 5Re, with particularly high dark matter fraction inside ~ 3Re. == Nearby galaxies ==