Links
- Editorial guides
- Wikipedia
- M87* on Wikipedia
- Preset views
M87*
Details
M87* is the supermassive black hole at the center of Messier 87. The Event Horizon Telescope’s 2019 image of its glowing ring became the first direct image of a black hole’s immediate surroundings, turning a previously inferred boundary into a measurable true-scale object.
M87* became famous as the black hole the world could finally see, but the real achievement was more precise than that slogan suggests. At the center of the giant galaxy Messier 87 sits a supermassive black hole whose immediate surroundings were resolved by the Event Horizon Telescope. For the first time, a black hole’s scale stopped being only an inference and became tied to a visible structure.
What appeared in the 2019 image was not a surface. It was a bright ring of emission from hot gas near the event horizon, surrounding a dark central shadow shaped by extreme gravity and the paths of light. That distinction matters because it turns M87* into a lesson in what black holes are actually like: not glowing objects with edges, but gravitational regions revealed indirectly by what happens around them.
That is why M87* matters far beyond the headline of a first image. It gave people a way to connect relativity, accretion physics, and black-hole scale to something real enough to examine. M87* did not make black holes less strange, but it made their strangeness measurable.
14.1billion km
Visual creditscaleofspace.org / CC BY-NC 4.0
Key facts
- Category
- Black holes
- Object class
- Supermassive black hole
- Host
- Messier 87
- Scale fact
- ~38 billion kmevent horizon diameter
- Mass
- ~6.5 billion solar masses
Scale context
Where M87* sits on the full axis
By size on the journey, M87* sits between Kuiper Belt and TON 618. The band below compares M87* with nearby Supermassive black hole objects so the size jump stays easy to read.
Shared physical scale
24.7billion km
Together, these objects make the size change around M87* easy to compare at a glance.
Between the smallest and the largest, perspective is everything.
About
Scale of Space is a scroll-based journey through the universe, placing objects on a single logarithmic scale so you can compare size across an unbroken range.
Guides turn parts of that scale into curated essays, while focused views let you explore the same range through specific groups of objects.