![]() The light collected to create the picture of M87* was released when our branch on the tree of life was a bunch of tiny, arguably adorable critters, barely recognizable as primates, and expanding across a planet with a recent and notable lack of dinosaurs. ![]() That’s fairly nearby in galactic terms (you can see it on a dark night), but that’s still incomprehensibly distant. M87* on the other hand is a freaking monster, but it’s 54 million light-years away. To see it we have to look long-ways through the disk of the Milky Way, which is full of stuff. Sagittarius A* is by far the closest SMB (a mere 26,000 light-years away), but of course there’s a galaxy in the way. M87* is massive even by supermassive standards. ![]() But M87* weighs in at around 6.5 billion Suns, more than a thousand times bigger. Our home galaxy’s supermassive black hole, Sagittarius A*, has the mass of around 4.1 million Suns, which is pretty massive. A galaxy’s SMB is almost always dead center and generally has a mass proportionate to the mass of the galaxy it calls home (or more likely, calls “mine”). This isn’t a coincidence, they’re instrumental in the formation of galaxies. Damn near every galaxy appears to have a SMB in its core. ![]() The picture that you’ve already seen is of M87*, the supermassive black hole (SMB) in the middle of the galaxy M87. The now-famous actual picture of M87* taken in the microwave spectrum. ![]()
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