Forming around one-sixth of its mass, M87's stars have a nearly spherically symmetric distribution. Instead, it has an almost featureless, ellipsoidal shape typical of most giant elliptical galaxies, diminishing in luminosity with distance from the center. Unlike a disk-shaped spiral galaxy, M87 has no distinctive dust lanes. M87 is about 16.4 million parsecs (53 million light-years) from Earth and is the second-brightest galaxy within the northern Virgo Cluster, having many satellite galaxies. The French astronomer Charles Messier discovered M87 in 1781, and cataloged it as a nebula. It is one of the brightest radio sources in the sky and a popular target for both amateur and professional astronomers. One of the most massive galaxies in the local universe, it has a large population of globular clusters-about 15,000 compared with the 150–200 orbiting the Milky Way-and a jet of energetic plasma that originates at the core and extends at least 1,500 parsecs (4,900 light-years), traveling at a relativistic speed. Messier 87 (also known as Virgo A or NGC 4486, generally abbreviated to M87) is a supergiant elliptical galaxy with several trillion stars in the constellation Virgo. The galactic core of Messier 87 as seen by the Hubble Space Telescope with its blue plasma jet clearly visible (composite image of observations in visible and infrared light)

Galaxy wallpapers for pc