Cosmic Scale
M87*
Supermassive black hole · 53 million light-years
How big is M87*?
M87* is about 3.8 × 10¹⁰ km across.
M87* was the first black hole ever photographed. In 2019 a network of radio telescopes spanning the planet produced the now-famous orange ring — the shadow of an object 6.5 billion times the Sun's mass, 53 million light-years away.
At a glance
| Diameter | 3.8 × 10¹⁰ km |
|---|---|
| Mass | 1.29 × 10⁴⁰ kg |
| Diameter compared with Earth | 3.0 × 10⁶ × Earth |
| Distance | 53 million light-years |
| Jet | 5,000 light-years long |
| Imaged | 2019 |
Good to know
- Its event horizon is wider than our entire Solar System, including the Kuiper Belt.
- A jet of plasma blasts out of it at nearly the speed of light and is visible in ordinary telescopes.
- The image needed so much data that the hard drives were flown, not transmitted, to be combined.
- Next smaller: Solar System · 9.0 × 10⁹ km
- Next larger: NGC 4889 · 0.01 light-years