Messier 87 facts for kids
Messier 87 (also called M87 or Virgo A) is a super giant elliptical galaxy. It was found in 1781 by a French astronomer named Charles Messier. He first thought it was a cloudy patch in the sky.
M87 is the second brightest galaxy in the northern Virgo Cluster. It is about 53.5 million light-years away from Earth.
Unlike a spiral galaxy (which looks like a flat disk), Messier 87 is shaped like a football or a sphere. It doesn't have clear dust lanes. The light from the galaxy gets dimmer the further you go from its center.
Contents
The Supermassive Black Hole
At the very heart of this huge galaxy is an even huger supermassive black hole. This black hole sends out strong radiation (energy waves), especially radio waves.
In 2019, scientists made history! They published the first-ever direct image of a black hole. This image was taken in 2017 by the Event Horizon Telescope. It shows the "shadow" of the black hole, surrounded by a bright ring. This ring is about 0.01 light-years wide.
The Powerful Jet
The black hole in M87 shoots out a powerful stream of hot gas, called plasma. This stream is known as a blazar. It travels at nearly the speed of light! This jet stretches out for at least 4,900 light-years.
Pictures from the Hubble Space Telescope in 1999 seemed to show the jet moving faster than light. But this is actually an optical illusion. It happens because the jet is moving so incredibly fast towards us.
Stars in Messier 87
The stars in Messier 87 make up about one-sixth of the galaxy's total mass. They are spread out evenly, but there are fewer stars the further you get from the center. The galaxy's outer edge reaches about 490,000 light-years from its core. It might stop there because it bumped into another galaxy.
Between the stars, there's a lot of gas. This gas has special elements in it that came from old stars.
Globular Clusters
Messier 87 has a huge number of globular clusters orbiting it. There are about 12,000 of these tight groups of stars! To compare, our own Milky Way galaxy only has about 150 to 200 globular clusters.
Messier 87 is one of the most massive giant elliptical galaxies close to Earth. It's also one of the brightest sources of radio waves in the sky. Because of this, it's a popular galaxy for both amateur (hobbyist) and professional astronomers to study.
Images for kids
-
In Hubble's galaxy classification scheme, M87 is an E0 galaxy
-
Stellar velocity map of the central region of M87, showing the motion of stars relative to Earth. Blue represents motion towards Earth and red indicates motion away, while yellow and green are in between. Image shows the aspects of a random nature among their movement.
-
Composite image showing how the M87 system looked, across the entire electromagnetic spectrum, during the Event Horizon Telescope's April 2017 campaign to take the first image of a black hole. Requiring 19 different facilities on the Earth and in space, this image reveals the enormous scales spanned by the black hole and its forward-pointing jet. The upper left of the figure is an image taken by ALMA, showing the larger-scale jet observed on the same scale as the visible image taken by the Hubble Space Telescope and the X-ray image by Chandra (upper right).
-
Radio wavelength image of M87 showing strong radio emission from the core
See also
In Spanish: Galaxia elíptica M87 para niños
