Messier 87: The Giant Galaxy with a Speedy Jet!

Messier 87, or M87 for short, is a humongous galaxy shaped like a giant egg. It's so big that it has more stars than you can even imagine, like trillions and trillions! That's way more stars than all the grains of sand on all the beaches in the world. M87 is so massive that it's one of the biggest and heaviest galaxies in our neighborhood of space. It's like the king of galaxies in its area!

One of the coolest things about M87 is a super-fast jet that shoots out from its very center. This jet is made of hot, energetic stuff called plasma, and it zooms out at almost the speed of light! It stretches for thousands of miles, which is longer than our entire solar system. Imagine a race car going faster than any car you've ever seen, but this jet is way, way faster and goes through space!

M87 has about 15,000 little families of stars called globular clusters. Our own Milky Way galaxy only has about 150 to 200. That means M87 has almost 100 times more star families than we do! These star families are like tiny villages of stars all hanging out together, and M87 has tons of them orbiting around it.

Right in the middle of M87 is a supermassive black hole. It's so powerful that it pulls everything towards it. Scientists were able to take the very first picture of a black hole's shadow using a special telescope. This picture was a huge deal because it showed us what this mysterious object looks like, even though we can't see it directly!