The galaxy's barred spiral centre is surrounded by a bright loop known as a resonance ring.

[3] In the nucleus of the galaxy is thought to exist a supermassive black hole whose mass upper limit is estimated to be between 8.5 and 37 million M☉, based on the intrinsic velocity dispersion as measured by the Hubble Space Telescope.

[4] Observations obtained with the GMOS integral field spectrograph on the Gemini North telescope show a gas flow is present in the inner ≈ 2 arcseconds (200 parsecs) of the galaxy, whose appearance is consistent with a bipolar outflow oriented along the north–south direction.

The rings lie at periodic orbits, known as resonances, certain positions where gravitational effects throughout the galaxy cause gas to pile up and accumulate in.

As external interactions could prevent the material from becoming sufficiently well organized in rings to trace the orbits so clearly, it is believed that NGC 3081 evolved in a relatively undisturbed manner.

Some parts of the nuclear ring and discrete knots in the arms feature higher numbers of younger stars than the rest of the nuclear ring interior, which suggests that they are sites of recent or ongoing star formation.

In the residual image created by Laurikainen et al. the secondary bar shows an ansae-type morphology.