Messier 87

Messier 87 is a huge elliptical galaxy in the Virgo constellation.

It is one of the largest and most massive galaxies in our local universe. Unlike our Milky Way, which is shaped like a flat disk, M87 is shaped like a ball or an egg. This shape is called an elliptical galaxy. It has no clear dust lanes to mark its structure. Instead, the light gets dimmer as you move away from the center. The galaxy contains several trillion stars.

These stars move in random directions to keep the galaxy's shape. This is different from spiral galaxies where stars move in more orderly paths.

Inside M87, there are many special groups of stars called globular clusters. These are large, tight bunches of stars that orbit the galaxy. M87 has about 15,000 of these clusters. To compare, our own Milky Way only has about 150 to 200. At the very center of the galaxy sits a supermassive black hole. This black hole is a primary part of the active galactic nucleus. It is so heavy that it pulls things toward it with great force. This central area also creates a long jet of energetic plasma.

This jet shoots out from the core and travels at a relativistic speed, which means it moves very close to the speed of light.

People have been studying this galaxy for a long time. A French astronomer named Charles Messier found it in 1781. He originally thought it was a nebula, which is a cloud of gas or dust. Later, in the 1880s, John Dreyer included it in a new catalog called the New General Catalogue. In 1918, an American astronomer named Heber Curtis noticed the galaxy had no spiral shape. He also saw a strange, straight ray connected to the center. In 1922, Edwin Hubble helped scientists understand that M87 was a galaxy far outside our own.

Scientists have used many tools to learn about M87's secrets. In 1978, researchers found evidence that the central mass was five billion times the mass of our Sun. In 2017, the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) collected data to look at the black hole directly. They released a famous processed image of the black hole's shadow on April 10, 2019.

In March 2021, the EHT team showed a new image using polarized light. This helps scientists study the forces that create quasars. The galaxy is about 55 million light-years away from Earth. It is the second-brightest galaxy in the northern Virgo Cluster.

Understanding M87 helps us see how big galaxies grow. Scientists believe elliptical galaxies like this form when smaller galaxies crash into each other. By looking at the stars, researchers found that M87 likely swallowed a medium-sized spiral galaxy about a billion years ago.

This process adds new stars and gas to the giant galaxy. We can also see how the galaxy interacts with its neighbors. There are even streams of stars that might have been pulled away by the gravity of M87. Studying this galaxy is like looking at a giant history book of the universe.