Which galaxy contains the supermassive black hole imaged by the Event Horizon Telescope in 2019? Messier 87 contains it.
The Event Horizon Telescope’s first black-hole image, released on April 10, 2019, showed the shadow of M87*, the supermassive black hole at the center of Messier 87. Messier 87 is a giant elliptical galaxy about 55 million light-years away in the constellation Virgo.
M87* is extraordinarily massive, estimated at roughly 6.5 billion times the mass of the Sun. Its enormous scale and relatively large apparent size made it a practical first target for the EHT, a planet-sized network of radio observatories linked through very-long-baseline interferometry. The image was not a photograph of the event horizon itself; it revealed glowing material and a dark shadow produced as gravity bends and captures light.
Messier 87 is also famous for its powerful relativistic jet, which extends thousands of light-years from the galaxy’s center. A common mix-up is Sagittarius A*, the black hole in our own Milky Way. The EHT released its image in 2022, not 2019, and it is much more variable and difficult to image despite being far closer.