#virgo supercluster

[zespaceblog]

Messier 86 - Elliptical Galaxy

It looks like a giant hole in space, but looking at elliptical galaxies with low resolution tends to merge all the stars up to a point, while not seeing the ones that lie behind, the truth is, the star density reduces as you move out in more or less a uniform pattern.

The 2nd image was taken by Hubble, and gives a better idea of how the stars are arranged.

What isn't easy to see is a stream of stars that extend from NGC 4438, a disrupted Spiral galaxy to the left of the above image, which appears to have been stripped of some material from M86, and closer in to M86 are a few stream of stars that look to have once been dwarf galaxies orbiting but now stripped by the larger galaxy.

Much of the dust and gas of M86 has been stripped out due to ram pressure, as the galaxy is moving quickly through interstellar space towards the centre of the Virgo cluster, causing the dust and gas to be pushed out as it moves.

[bed-wed-behead-your-fave]

virgo supercluster irl

Bed Wed or Behead Virgo Supercluster from real life.

Bed

Wed

Behead

Voting ended onMay 12, 2024

[therealuniverse]

Heading through the Virgo Supercluster, some of the galaxies somewhat near us, and finding the relationship between distance and relative velocity originally discovered by Edwin Hubble.

[somethingusefulfromflorida]

Is the Great Attractor the barycenter of our galactic cluster?

Like, we can’t see anything there, so maybe there’s nothing there at all.

The moon doesn’t orbit the Earth, they mutually orbit each other, it just so happens that the center of their orbit falls inside the Earth.

Pluto and it’s moon Charon orbit each other, but their masses are much closer, so they orbit a point between them rather than inside either of them.

Maybe the Great Attractor is just the point that all the local galaxies/clusters orbit around; if we accounted for all the galaxies we can observe moving towards it, maybe we’d see that the Great Attractor is just the local center of mass.  There may be nothing there, but on average everything revolves around it.

For all I know, I’m just talking out of my ass; I’m not an astronomer.  I’m sure there are more plausible hypotheses, certainly more complex ones at that.

[thepurplebones]

The First ever black hole image:

Space is awesome!

[kuiperkat]

M87 — Black Hole Day

For context, this black hole is located within M87. M87 is a supergiant elliptical galaxy in the constellation Virgo.

It is one of the most massive galaxies in the local Universe, and part of the Virgo Supercluster.

This image of the galactic core was taken by The Hubble Space Telescope; M87’s blue plasma jet clearly visible (composite image of observations in visible and infrared light)

(📸 credit: Chris Mihos (Case Western Reserve University) ESO; @nasa) #ehtblackhole #RealBlackHole

[blackcoffeedreams]

[spinningblueball]

Three distinctly different views of the Milky Way Galaxy. We see it very one dimensional as in the top view. However, our galaxy is a barred spiral galaxy as seen in the second and third pictures. We are approximately 27,000 light years from the "galactic center" of our galaxy in the Orion arm. They say that we have roughly 100 billion planets in our galaxy, along with about 100-400 billion stars. Some of our stars are nearly as old as the universe itself and likely resulted from the original "Big Bang" that started the universe. We have a bunch of galaxies around us that fall into a group called the Virgo Supercluster, which in itself is a part of the Laniakea Supercluster.