Virgo Galaxy (M87)
A giant elliptical galaxy in the Virgo Cluster with an active centre. Its distance comes from the brightest red giants Hubble can count in it: about 50 million light-years.
Galaxy in Virgo. Magnitude 9.0.
Can you see it from Guyana?
From Georgetown (6.8° N) it climbs to 85° above the northern horizon at its highest; from Lethem (3.4° N), to 81° above the northern horizon. It is highest at midnight on the night of 28 Mar, in the middle of its season. The page works out tonight's rise, highest point and set for both towns in Guyana time (UTC-4), and where the Moon is.
What you'll see
- Your eyes: Not visible to the eye. It lies 7.8° west of Vindemiatrix.
- 10x50 binoculars: A faint smudge from a dark site.
- A small telescope (80 to 100 mm): A round glow with a bright core; M86 and M84 are 1.3° and 1.5° to the north-west.
- A camera: Tiny on camera: it needs 2,000 mm or more of focal length on a tracking mount.
How big, how bright, how far
- Size on the sky: 7.1′ × 6.7′, 23% of the Moon's width (the Moon is about 31′ wide).
- Brightness: magnitude 9.0. Fainter than the faintest stars in Georgetown (4.3) and Lethem (6.0): binoculars or a telescope.
- Distance: 50 million light-years. The light reaching your eye left it about 50 million years ago.
- True size: 110,000 light-years across its catalogued outline; light crosses it in 110,000 years.
Apparent size from OpenNGC (Mattia Verga), CC-BY-SA-4.0.
What it is made of
- Type
- Giant elliptical galaxy
- Notable
- It holds about 12,000 globular clusters, against under 200 for the Milky Way, and its central black hole, one of the most massive known, was imaged by the Event Horizon Telescope.
What is in it, not measured:
- Old stars: mostly old, yellow and red
- Very little cold gas or dust
- Dark matter: inferred from how its stars move
How we know: Distance from its brightest red giants (the tip of the red giant branch): NED-D (NASA/IPAC Extragalactic Database, redshift-independent distances), median of 3 TRGB estimates: 16.00 Mpc, 15.10-16.70 Mpc; e.g. 2016ApJ...822...70L, 2016ApJ...819...77L, 2010A&A...524A..71B; retrieved 2026-10-21. True size: the apparent size times the distance (apparent size: OpenNGC (Mattia Verga, CC BY-SA 4.0), commit 4e2398a2).
More deep-sky objects: M86 (Galaxy) · M89 (Galaxy) · M84 (Galaxy) · M90 (Galaxy) · M58 (Galaxy) · M88 (Galaxy)