M87

The giant galaxy whose central black hole was the first ever imaged.

M87 is the supermassive black hole at the core of Messier 87 (Virgo A, NGC 4486), a supergiant elliptical galaxy of several trillion stars in Virgo, about 16.4 million parsecs away. The galaxy has around 15,000 globular clusters and a jet of plasma that streams from its core at relativistic speed.

The black hole powers the galaxy's active nucleus. It was imaged with Event Horizon Telescope data collected in 2017, and the final image released on 10 April 2019 was the first picture of a black hole.