#arp 152

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M87, one of the largest and most massive galaxies in the local universe // Pornthep Benyaapikul

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M87 // Jean-Pierre Lees

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M87 // Wei-Hao Wang

M87 is the biggest and brightest galaxies not just in the Virgo Cluster, but in the local universe! It contains several trillions of stars, weighing in at double the stellar mass of the entire Milky Way galaxy! Of course, most of the mass of the galaxy is made up of invisible dark matter, so the true mass might be 200 times that of the Milky Way.

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M87 // Rolf Olsen

M87, also called Virgo A, is an extremely radio-loud galaxy, meaning it emits a lot of light in the radio. The source of this radio? Likely a supermassive black hole at its core!

This black hole, called M87* (M87-star), is about 6 billion times the mass of the Sun and has a size of about 120 AU, or about 3 times the distance between the Sun and Pluto!

M87* was the first black hole to ever be directly imaged, a task accomplished with the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) in 2019. This telescope works by combining the light-gathering power from several radio telescope across the world, effectively making a telescope as large as the Earth itself!

The black hole is currently swallowing up material and has a ring of highly ionized gas around it (shown in orange in the inset). Sometimes the black hole "burps" and emits a jet of matter. This jet currently measures about 5,000 light years long moving at about 85% the speed of light.