Messier 87

The galactic core of Messier 87, with its blue plasma jet clearly visible (composite image of observations by the Hubble Space Telescope in visible and infrared light)

## Characteristics

### Size

40.55 kpc (132,000 ly)[5][6](25.0 mag/arcsec2 B-band isophote)

## Other designations

### Places :

Virgo A, Virgo X-1, NGC 4486, UGC 7654, PGC 41361, VCC 1316, Arp 152, 3C 274,[5] 3U 1228+12.

**Messier 87** (also known as **Virgo A** or **NGC 4486**, generally abbreviated to **M87**) is a supergiant elliptical galaxy in the constellation Virgo that contains several trillion stars. One of the largest and most massive galaxies in the local universe, it has a large population of globular clusters—about 15,000 compared with the 150–200 orbiting the Milky Way—and a jet of energetic plasma that originates at the core and extends at least 1,500 parsecs (4,900 light-years), traveling at a relativistic speed. It is one of the brightest radio sources in the sky and a popular target for both amateur and professional astronomers.

The French astronomer Charles Messier discovered M87 in 1781, and cataloged it as a nebula. M87 is about 16.4 million parsecs (53 million light-years) from Earth and is the second-brightest galaxy within the northern Virgo Cluster, having many satellite galaxies. Unlike a disk-shaped spiral galaxy, M87 has no distinctive dust lanes. Instead, it has an almost featureless, ellipsoidal shape typical of most giant elliptical galaxies, diminishing in luminosity with distance from the center. Forming around one-sixth of its mass, M87's stars have a nearly spherically symmetric distribution. Their population density decreases with increasing distance from the core. It has an active supermassive black hole at its core, which forms the primary component of an active galactic nucleus. The black hole was imaged using data collected in 2017 by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), with a final, processed image released on 10 April 2019. In March 2021, the EHT Collaboration presented, for the first time, a polarized-based image of the black hole which may help better reveal the forces giving rise to quasars.

The galaxy is a strong source of multi-wavelength radiation, particularly radio waves. It has an isophotal diameter of 40.55 kiloparsecs (132,000 light-years), with a diffuse galactic envelope that extends to a radius of about 150 kiloparsecs (490,000 light-years), where it is truncated—possibly by an encounter with another galaxy. Its interstellar medium consists of diffuse gas enriched by elements emitted from evolved stars.

## Observation history

In 1781, the French astronomer Charles Messier published a catalogue of 103 objects that had a nebulous appearance as part of a list intended to identify objects that might otherwise be confused with comets. In subsequent use, each catalogue entry was prefixed with an "M". Thus, M87 was the eighty-seventh object listed in Messier's catalogue. During the 1880s, the object was included as NGC 4486 in the *New General Catalogue* of nebulae and star clusters assembled by the Danish-Irish astronomer John Dreyer, which he based primarily on the observations of the English astronomer John Herschel.

In 1918, the American astronomer Heber Curtis of Lick Observatory noted M87's lack of a spiral structure and observed a "curious straight ray ... apparently connected with the nucleus by a thin line of matter." The ray appeared brightest near the galactic center. The following year, supernova SN 1919A within M87 reached a peak photographic magnitude of 11.5, although this event was not reported until photographic plates were examined by the Russian astronomer Innokentii A. Balanowski in 1922.

### Identification as a galaxy

In 1922, the American astronomer Edwin Hubble categorized M87 as one of the brighter globular nebulae, as it lacked any spiral structure, but like spiral nebulae, appeared to belong to the family of non-galactic nebulae. In 1926 he produced a new categorization, distinguishing extragalactic from galactic nebulae, the former being independent star systems. M87 was classified as a type of elliptical extragalactic nebula with no apparent elongation (class E0).

In 1931, Hubble described M87 as a member of the Virgo Cluster, and gave a provisional estimate of 1.8 million parsecs (5.9 million light-years) from Earth. It was then the only known elliptical nebula for which individual stars could be resolved, although it was pointed out that globular clusters would be indistinguishable from individual stars at such distances. In his 1936 *The Realm of the Nebulae*, Hubble examines the terminology of the day; some astronomers labeled extragalactic nebulae as *external galaxies* on the basis that they were stellar systems at far distances from our own galaxy, while others preferred the conventional term *extragalactic nebulae*, as *galaxy* was at that time a synonym for the Milky Way. M87 continued to be labelled as an extragalactic nebula at least until 1954.

### Modern research

In 1947, a prominent radio source, Virgo A, was identified overlapping the location of M87. The source was confirmed to be M87 by 1953, and the linear relativistic jet emerging from the core of the galaxy was suggested as the cause. This jet extended from the core at a position angle of 260° to an angular distance of 20″ with an angular width of 2″. In 1969–1970, a strong component of the radio emission was found to closely align with the optical source of the jet. In 1966, the United States Naval Research Laboratory's Aerobee 150 rocket identified Virgo X-1, the first X-ray source in Virgo. The Aerobee rocket launched from White Sands Missile Range on 7 July 1967 yielded further evidence that the source of Virgo X-1 was the radio galaxy M87. Subsequent X-ray observations by the HEAO 1 and Einstein Observatory showed a complex source that included the active galactic nucleus of M87. However, there is little central concentration of the X-ray emission.

M87 has been an important testing ground for techniques that measure the masses of central supermassive black holes in galaxies. In 1978, stellar-dynamical modeling of the mass distribution in M87 gave evidence for a central mass of five billion M☉ solar masses. After the installation of the COSTAR corrective-optics module in the Hubble Space Telescope in 1993, the Hubble Faint Object Spectrograph (FOS) was used to measure the rotation velocity of the ionized gas disk at the center of M87, as an "early release observation" designed to test the scientific performance of the post-repair Hubble instruments. The FOS data indicated a central black hole mass of 2.4 billion M☉, with 30% uncertainty. Globular clusters within M87 have been used to calibrate metallicity relations as well.

M87 was observed by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) during much of 2017. The event horizon of the black hole at the center was directly imaged by the EHT, then revealed in a press conference on the issue date stated, filtering out from this the first image of a black hole's shadow