What is Messier 87?
Q: What is Messier 87?
A: Messier 87 (also known as M87, Virgo A or NGC 4486) is a supergiant elliptical galaxy.
Q: When was it discovered?
A: It was discovered in 1781 by the French astronomer Charles Messier.
Q: How far away from Earth is it located?
A: It is about 16.4 million parsecs (53.5 million light-years) from Earth.
Q: What does it look like?
A: Unlike a disk-shaped spiral galaxy, Messier 87 has no distinctive dust lanes and has an almost featureless, ellipsoidal shape with luminosity diminishing with distance from the centre.
Q: What can be found at its core?
A: At the core of this unusually large galaxy is an unusually large supermassive black hole which is a strong source of radiation at many wavelengths, particularly radio waves.
Q: What image was taken by the Event Horizon Telescope in 2017?
A: The image taken by the Event Horizon Telescope in 2017 showed the shadow of the black hole surrounded by an emission ring with a diameter of 3.36×10−3 parsecs (0.0110 light-years).
Q: How fast does its jet travel?
A: In pictures taken by the Hubble Space Telescope in 1999, the motion of Messier 87's jet was measured at four to six times the speed of light although this may be an optical illusion caused by relativistic velocity of the jet.
