Virgo A

Messier 87 (NGC 4486), also known as Virgo A, is the dominant galaxy of the Virgo Cluster — a colossal elliptical system lying approximately 54 million light-years away in the constellation Virgo. Charles Messier catalogued it on March 18, 1781. NGC 4486 is spherical in form and roughly 120,000 light-years in diameter, but because it is a sphere rather than a flat disk its total mass is staggering: astronomers estimate over 2 trillion solar masses — far greater than the Milky Way. Embedded in M87's outer halo are thousands of globular clusters, visible as tiny fuzzy points in deep images, numbering over 12,000 — one of the richest globular cluster systems known.

The most remarkable feature of NGC 4486 is a luminous jet erupting from its nucleus: a narrow, collimated stream of electrons and magnetic field accelerated to nearly the speed of light by the galaxy's central supermassive black hole — a monster of 6.5 billion solar masses. In 2019, the Event Horizon Telescope collaboration produced the world's first direct image of a black hole's shadow, using M87 as their target — a landmark in the history of astronomy. The jet extends thousands of light-years and is detectable from radio waves through optical light and X-rays, making M87 one of the most powerful natural particle accelerators in the Universe.

In binoculars M87 appears as a round, bright smudge; a small telescope shows a compact, intensely concentrated nucleus embedded in a halo of diffuse light. The jet is not visible visually but can be detected in long-exposure photographs. This image was taken as part of the Advanced Observing Program (AOP) at the Kitt Peak Visitor Center in 2014.