![]() ![]() The dark in the middle isn’t the black hole itself, so much as a lack of gases. That glow is a fire storm in space far bigger than our solar system. M87*, despite being substantially larger than the orbit of Neptune, is much smaller than the cloud of stuff falling into it, so there’s a bottle neck as gas falls in and that means friction and compression and that means heat. The blurry doughnut is a cloud of in-falling gases that heat up and ionize as they fall in. That tiny blue tail is a jet of plasma (one of two) that’s been streaming out of the disk of gas falling into M87* for at least 5000 years. But as an elliptical galaxy, it looks like a smudge on the lens. Right: As a super giant galaxy, M87 is visible to the naked eye from 54 million light years away. Left: The disk of our galaxy (as viewed from inside our galaxy) obscures a band of the sky all the way around us, including the galactic core (home of Sagittarius A*). The galaxy M87 is the 87th thing on Messier’s “ignore this” list. So Messier wrote a list of things he didn’t want to look at twice, and that rejection list is what he’s remembered for now (incidentally, he also discovered some comets). It turns out that to an 18th century telescope, there are lots of vague, blurry things in the sky that might be comets, but aren’t. At the time astronomers were getting famous putting their names on comets (worked for Halley) and Messier wanted a part of the action. In balance, it was easier to image M87*, a black hole a thousand times bigger and two thousand times farther away, than Sagittarius A*.Īs a quick aside, that stunningly boring name, “M87”, comes from Messier (being French, his name is pronounced “mess-E-ay”). The light collected to create the picture of M87* was released when our branch on the tree of life was a bunch of tiny, arguably adorable critters, barely recognizable as primates, and expanding across a planet with a recent and notable lack of dinosaurs. That’s fairly nearby in galactic terms (you can see it on a dark night), but that’s still incomprehensibly distant. ![]() M87* on the other hand is a freaking monster, but it’s 54 million light-years away. To see it we have to look long-ways through the disk of the Milky Way, which is full of stuff. Sagittarius A* is by far the closest SMB (a mere 26,000 light-years away), but of course there’s a galaxy in the way. M87* is massive even by supermassive standards. But M87* weighs in at around 6.5 billion Suns, more than a thousand times bigger. Our home galaxy’s supermassive black hole, Sagittarius A*, has the mass of around 4.1 million Suns, which is pretty massive. A galaxy’s SMB is almost always dead center and generally has a mass proportionate to the mass of the galaxy it calls home (or more likely, calls “mine”). This isn’t a coincidence, they’re instrumental in the formation of galaxies. Damn near every galaxy appears to have a SMB in its core. ![]() The picture that you’ve already seen is of M87*, the supermassive black hole (SMB) in the middle of the galaxy M87. The now-famous actual picture of M87* taken in the microwave spectrum. ![]()
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