Messier 87 and Its Relativistic Jet: A Glimpse into a Cosmic Powerhouse
We managed to image the giant galaxy Messier 87, the queen of the Virgo Cluster, capturing its relativistic jet with nice details.
Messier 87 and its relativistic jet. 18 Apr. 2025.
The image above comes from the sigma-clipping combination of 9, 120-second, unguided exposures, unfiltered, remotely taken with the the Celestron C14+Paramount ME+SBIG ST10-XME robotic unit available as part of the Virtual Telescope Project in Manciano, Italy
Among the most iconic galaxies in the nearby universe, Messier 87 (aka NGC 4486 or Virgo A) is a true giant, sitting at the heart of the Virgo Cluster, some 55 million light-years away. Unlike the elegant spiral galaxies that often populate the pages of astronomy books, M87 is an enormous elliptical galaxy, characterized by its smooth, featureless profile, apparently of poor interest. But… something far more dramatic is lurking at its core.
At the center of M87 lies a supermassive black hole with a mass of about 6.5 billion times that of our Sun. This black hole gained worldwide attention in 2019, when it became the first ever to be directly “imaged” by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT). But decades before that historic achievement, M87 was already famous for a striking phenomenon: a luminous relativistic jet of matter, streaming out from its nucleus at nearly the speed of light.
This jet extends across more than 5,000 light-years, and can be observed in multiple wavelengths, from radio and optical to X-rays. It originates from the dynamic interaction between the black hole’s intense gravitational field and the surrounding accretion disk. As magnetic fields twist and accelerate infalling matter, some of it is ejected outward in tightly collimated jets along the black hole’s rotational axis. For relativistic effects, of the two jets originated by the mechanism above, only the one pointing the observer is visible.
The image captured by the Virtual Telescope Project reveals this jet in unprecedented detail for telescope of this class, despite the galaxy’s vast distance. Appearing as a thin, glowing filament extending from the galaxy’s luminous core, it is a visible sign of one of the most extreme physical processes in the universe.
Messier 87 reminds us that galaxies are not just collections of stars, gas, and dust, but also hosts of cosmic engines that shape their environments on scales spanning thousands of light-years.
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