M87 / Virgo A

Giant elliptical galaxy, home to the first black hole ever directly imaged (2019).

Also called: Virgo A, the galaxy with the photographed black hole.

🕒 When can I see it?🚀 Travel there

What it is

Elliptical galaxy: An old, round swarm with little gas left to make stars. Every kind of thing there is →

How to find M87 / Virgo A

Look in the constellation Virgo.

It is best placed in the spring if you are north of the equator.

From the southern hemisphere, look in the autumn.

Visible mainly from the both half of the world.

Star-hop: The galaxy's fuzzy glow shows in an 8-inch scope; resolving its black hole took a telescope the size of the Earth.

The Planetarium works out where it actually is from your own place and the date — including whether it is above the horizon at all tonight.

Show me M87 / Virgo A in tonight's sky

What you will really see

Through a small telescope, on a good night

A small round smudge of glow, brightest in the middle, with no detail.

Honest, not glamorous — why the pictures here are drawn.

🔭 See it drawn as it looks through a telescope

Worth knowing about M87 / Virgo A

On that same scale, M87 would be about 55 kilometers away. Light takes 55.0 million years to get here from M87 / Virgo A, so what you are looking at is M87 / Virgo A as it was 55.0 million years ago.

What it is made of: A giant elliptical galaxy, one of the largest and most massive in the nearby universe.
What makes it worth knowing: Home to the first black hole ever directly imaged, in 2019 (~6.5 billion solar masses); also shoots a near-light-speed particle jet ~5,000 light-years long.; How we know: A worldwide network of radio telescopes (the Event Horizon Telescope) combined signals into an Earth-sized 'virtual telescope' sharp enough to photograph the black hole's shadow. Rung 6 — the distance to other galaxies
Its name and its story: Sits in Virgo, named for the Roman goddess of the harvest; also called 'Virgo A' for being the brightest radio source in that constellation.

The numbers