Virgo Cluster facts for kids
The Virgo Cluster is a huge group of galaxies located about 54 million light years away from us. You can find it in the direction of the constellation Virgo. This cluster is like the heart of an even bigger group called the Virgo Supercluster. Our own Local Group of galaxies, which includes the Milky Way, is part of this supercluster, but we're on the outer edges.
The Virgo Cluster is home to around 1,300 to 2,000 galaxies! It's super heavy, weighing about 1.2 quadrillion (that's 1,200,000,000,000,000) times the mass of our Sun.
Many of the brighter galaxies in this cluster were first seen in the late 1700s. Charles Messier added them to his special list of fuzzy objects that weren't comets. He thought they were "nebulae" (cloudy patches) without stars. Scientists didn't realize they were actual galaxies until the 1920s. You can even see many of these galaxies with a small telescope! The brightest galaxy in the cluster is a giant elliptical galaxy called Messier 49. Another important one is Messier 87.
Images for kids
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Turbulence might stop galaxy clusters from cooling (from the Chandra X-ray telescope).
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A map of the Virgo Supercluster, with our Local Group in the center. The Virgo Cluster is on the right, about 50 million light-years from us.
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A deep photo of the Virgo Cluster, with unrelated objects removed.
See also
In Spanish: Cúmulo de Virgo para niños
