Word: m87
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...center of enormous gravity. Herbert Gursky and Andrea Dupree of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics believe that these stars "may well be orbiting a black hole with the mass of a thousand suns." Still other candidates lie far beyond the Milky Way. At least two galaxies, known as M87 and NGC6251 in astronomy catalogues, seem to be undergoing violent upheavals, quite possibly because of black holes inside them...
...well, monsters with event horizons millions of miles across and formed from a mass equal to that of billions of suns. Observations with the big telescopes at California's Palomar and Arizona's Kitt Peak National observatories strongly support the likelihood that at least one such heavyweight exists in M87, a galaxy that appears to be spewing out a great jet of matter. Astronomers found that M87's center is ten times as bright as the rest of the galaxy, and is surrounded by stars orbiting at unexpectedly high velocities. To provide the gravitational power plant for this galactic vortex...
...prosaic style of astronomical catalogues, it is known simply as M87. But there is nothing simple about the giant galaxy. Some 30 million light-years from earth and about 100 times the diameter of the sun's own Milky Way galaxy, M87 is a great spherical island of billions of stars apparently in the midst of a tremendous upheaval. Photographs of M87 taken through the 200-in. telescope atop California's Palomar Mountain seem to show (top) that the galaxy is shooting into space an enormous jet of material, equal to the mass of countless suns...
...picture of the distant galaxy, taken by Hale Observatories Astronomer Halton Arp, reveals that M87 is even more remarkable than scientists had thought. The product of computer-enhancement techniques developed for NASA by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Arp's picture shows that M87 is ejecting not merely a single stream of matter but a whole series of dense, luminous objects (bottom). Says Arp: "The galaxy must have undergone an explosion or a succession of explosions that threw them out at high velocity. The most intriguing question is: What will they develop into...
Radio astronomers are willing to advance such gaudy theories, but only as conjecture. They cannot be sure about anything; the sky is too full of mysteries that they cannot begin to explain. A strong radio source that has been labeled M87, now proves to be a galaxy that can be photographed in visible light. It has a strange jet of glowing material that extends from one side and reaches many thousand light-years beyond its normal circumference. Does this jet have something to do with the galaxy's radio waves? It probably does, say the radio astronomers, but they...