Introduction

HST UV images of nearby galaxies presented by Maoz et al. (1996) and Barth et al. (1998), as well as analogous space-borne optical images of early-type galaxies discussed by Lauer et al. (1995) and Carollo et al. (1997) have shown that about 15% of imaged galaxies show evidence of unresolved central spikes.

In the following we discuss two ‘prototype’ galactic spheroids, NGC 2681 and NGC 4552, that we properly monitored with HST–which host UV-bright, unresolved spikes at their center. While the early-spiral (Sa) galaxy NGC 2681 shows a nonvariable unresolved cusp, the UV spike which became visible at the center of the Virgo Elliptical NGC 4552 is a UV flare caught in mid-action, presumably related to a transient accretion event onto a central supermassive black hole (Renzini et al. 1995; Cappellari et al. 1998).