Messier 87 — Galaxy in Virgo

M87 (also known as Virgo A) is a supergiant elliptical galaxy located about 53.5 million light-years away at the dynamical center of the Virgo Cluster. It is one of the most massive galaxies in the nearby universe, containing several trillion stars and spanning about 240,000 light-years across. M87 hosts an enormous supermassive black hole of 6.5 billion solar masses at its center — famously the first black hole ever directly imaged, by the Event Horizon Telescope collaboration in 2019. The galaxy is also renowned for its prominent relativistic jet, a beam of energetic plasma shooting outward from the vicinity of the black hole at nearly the speed of light, extending over 5,000 light-years. M87 possesses an extraordinarily rich system of roughly 15,000 globular clusters, compared to the Milky Way's approximately 150.

Located at the heart of the Virgo Cluster, about 2 degrees northwest of the star Rho Virginis. In binoculars, M87 appears as a bright, round fuzzy spot. A 4-inch telescope at 100x shows a large, luminous core with an extensive haze. The famous jet is a challenging but achievable target — it requires at least a 10-inch telescope under excellent seeing conditions at high magnification (200x+), appearing as a faint spike extending from the nucleus at position angle roughly 290 degrees (west-northwest). Use averted vision and allow your eyes to fully dark-adapt. Best observed from March through June. M87's location amid many other galaxies makes galaxy-hopping through the Virgo Cluster core a rewarding experience.

Discovered by Charles Messier on March 18, 1781. In 1918, Heber Curtis at Lick Observatory first noticed the jet as a 'curious straight ray' in a photographic plate. In 1947, M87 was identified as one of the first extragalactic radio sources (Virgo A). On April 10, 2019, the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) collaboration released the first-ever direct image of a black hole's shadow — the supermassive black hole at the center of M87. This landmark image, compiled from data taken by a global network of radio telescopes, confirmed key predictions of general relativity and earned the EHT team the 2020 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics.