Forcapedia/Science/Messier 87: The Galaxy That Gave Us the First Black Hole Photo

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Messier 87: The Galaxy That Gave Us the First Black Hole Photo

Messier 87 (M87) is a supergiant elliptical galaxy located about 53 million light-years away in the Virgo Cluster. It made history in 2019 when the Event Horizon Telescope captured the first-ever image of a black hole's shadow at its core, and it remains a crucial laboratory for studying supermassive black holes, relativistic jets, and galaxy evolution.

Sources

[1] NASA
[2] Event Horizon Telescope
[3] European Southern Observatory
[4] Hubble Space Telescope
[5] Encyclopaedia Britannica