The Virgo Cluster is a cluster of galaxies whose center is 53.8 ± 0.3 Mly away in the Virgo constellation. Comprising approximately 1,300 member galaxies, the cluster forms the heart of the larger Vir
The southern portion of the Virgo Cluster as imaged by the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in very high resolution, taken on June 5, 2025.
Turbulence may prevent galaxy clusters from cooling (Chandra X-ray).
Photograph of the Virgo Cluster, a few degrees around M86, with labelled galaxies
Messier 87 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 populat
Virgo Cluster
…8 degrees of the cluster's center or a radius of about 2.2 Mpc. Many of the brighter galaxies in this cluster, including the giant elliptical galaxy Messier 87, were discovered in the late 1770s and early 1780s and subsequently included in Charles Messier's catalogue of non-cometary fuzzy objects. Described…
Messier 87, with the blue plasma jet of its galactic core clearly visible (composite image of observations by the Hubble Space Telescope in visible and infrared light)
In Hubble's galaxy classification scheme, M87 is an E0 galaxy.
The Event Horizon Telescope image of the core of M87 using 1.3 mm microwaves. The central dark spot is the shadow of M87* and is larger than the black hole's event horizon.
A view of the jet and shadow of M87's black hole. Observations from the Global Millimetre VLBI Array (GMVA), the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), and the Greenland Telescope.