Galaxy in Virgo
Virgo A (M87)
Heber Curtis photographed what he called a curious straight ray coming out of this galaxy in 1918, and had no idea what he was looking at. A century later the Event Horizon Telescope photographed the thing firing it — the first black hole ever imaged, in the largest galaxy anywhere near us.
The jet is around five thousand light-years long and is the same one Curtis photographed. The black hole is six and a half billion solar masses, and the image the Event Horizon Telescope published in 2019 is not a photograph of the hole but of the shadow it casts — the size of that shadow is set by general relativity, and it came out the size the theory said.
- Catalogue
- M87
- Type
- Galaxy
- Constellation
- Virgo
- Distance
- 53 million light-years
- Apparent magnitude
- 8.6
- Surface brightness
- 21.5 mag/□″
- Apparent size
- 7′
- Right ascension
- 12h 31m
- Declination
- +12.40°
- Found by
- Charles Messier, 1781
Small enough that its 8.6 magnitudes arrive concentrated rather than smeared: 21.5 per square arcsecond, which is why it stands out from the sky better than its brightness alone suggests. Why surface brightness is the number that matters.
Could you see it?
Straightforward with 10×50 binoculars from Bortle 5.
| Sky | Eye | 10×50 | 80mm | 130mm | 200mm |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bortle 1 21.9 mag/□″ | No | Easy | Easy | Easy | Easy |
| Bortle 2 21.7 mag/□″ | No | Easy | Easy | Easy | Easy |
| Bortle 3 21.4 mag/□″ | No | Easy | Easy | Easy | Easy |
| Bortle 4 20.9 mag/□″ | No | Easy | Easy | Easy | Easy |
| Bortle 5 20.3 mag/□″ | No | Easy | Easy | Easy | Easy |
| Bortle 6 19.3 mag/□″ | No | Challenge | Challenge | Challenge | Challenge |
| Bortle 7 18.6 mag/□″ | No | No | No | No | No |
| Bortle 8 18.1 mag/□″ | No | No | No | No | No |
| Bortle 9 17.8 mag/□″ | No | No | No | No | No |
At the eyepiece
A large, round, entirely smooth glow with no detail — which is fitting for something that is essentially a vast pile of old stars. The jet is a photographic and large-aperture object. What you are looking at, with no visual evidence whatever, is the galaxy that gave us the first picture of a black hole.
When, and from where
Highest in the middle of the night in March. Passes overhead at 12°N and rises from everywhere except the far south — below 78°S it never clears the horizon.
| Latitude | Highest it gets | |
|---|---|---|
| 60°N Oslo, Anchorage | 42° | |
| 51°N London, Calgary | 51° | |
| 40°N New York, Madrid | 62° | |
| 30°N Cairo, Houston | 72° | |
| 0°N the equator | 78° | |
| 33°S Sydney, Cape Town | 45° |
Nearby in the sky
The whole catalogue →This is a busy patch. 4 more of the catalogue sit within five degrees, which is a binocular field or two — worth planning a session around rather than visiting once. Everything below is measured from M87 itself, not from the middle of Virgo.
- M89 Galaxy 1.2° apart Virgo · magnitude 9.8 · binoculars from Bortle 4 or darker
- M86 Galaxy 1.2° apart Virgo · magnitude 8.9 · binoculars from Bortle 5 or darker
- M84 Galaxy 1.5° apart Virgo · magnitude 9.1 · binoculars from Bortle 5 or darker
- M90 Galaxy 1.7° apart Virgo · magnitude 9.5 · binoculars from Bortle 4 or darker
Terms on this page
- Event horizon The boundary around a black hole past which nothing gets out — not a surface, but a point of no return.
One of 110. Positions J2000; the sky is the final authority.