M87

A giant radio galaxy located 50 million light-years away, M87 harbours a super-massive black hole.

Spanning 120,000 light-years, M87 is an incredibly luminous galaxy containing far more mass and stars than the Milky Way - gravitationally distorting its four dwarf satellite galaxies. It has about three trillion stars compared to just 400 billion for our Milky Way galaxy, and is known to contain in excess of several thousand globular clusters - up to 150,000 - far more than the Milky Way's 200.

Galactic Core

The central black hole has a mass of three thousand million stars, from which a jet of particles and magnetic fields emanates several thousand light-years into space. A second jet is erupting in the opposite direction. The core of the galaxy, acting like a cosmic particle accelerator, also produces very high energy gamma rays with an energy level more than a million times that of visible light.

The size of the region producing the gamma rays is just about the size of a solar system, only about 0.000001 % of the size of the whole radio galaxy. This is not much larger than the event horizon of the central super-massive black hole.

Probability of Life

It has been suggested that M87 may be rich in advanced life forms as not only is it a huge and ancient stellar island in its own right, but it is part of the massive Virgo Supercluster of galaxies.

By comparison, our Local Group of galaxies is at the fringe of the Virgo Supercluster (65 million light years) and consists of only two large barred spirals, us and Andromeda, and one smaller unbarred spiral named Triangulum. The rest are mainly dwarfs and most of them are satellites of the two large spirals.