SpazeGiant elliptical galaxy
Messier 87
A giant ball of trillions of stars at the heart of the Virgo cluster. Its black hole was the first ever photographed, in 2019.
- Distance
- 53.5 million light years
- Stars
- ~several trillion
- Globular clusters
- ~12,000
Made of
- Dark matter 90%
- Stars 9.5%
- Gas and dust 0.5%
Hundreds of billions of stars in a halo of dark matter
Modelled from rotation curves and star counts