Black Hole-Powered Jet in Elliptical Galaxy M87

Elliptical galaxy Messier 87 (M87) is the home of several trillion stars, a supermassive black hole, and a family of 15,000 globular star clusters. Amid its smooth, yellow population of older stars, the two features that stand out most in this image of M87 are its soft blue jet and the myriad starlike globular clusters scattered in a huge sphere around the galaxy. M87 may have accumulated some of its globular clusters by gravitationally pulling them from dwarf galaxies in its galactic neighborhood. The jet is a black-hole-powered stream of material that is being ejected from the core of the galaxy. As gaseous material from the center of the galaxy accretes onto the black hole, the resultant energy released produces a fire-hose stream of subatomic particles that are accelerated to velocities near the speed of light.