High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Messier 87 (also known as M87, Virgo A or NGC 4486) is a supergiant elliptical galaxy. It was discovered in 1781 by the French astronomer Charles Messier, who cataloged it as a nebulous feature. The second brightest galaxy within the northern Virgo Cluster, it is located about 16.4 million parsecs (53.5 million light-years) from Earth. Unlike a disk-shaped spiral galaxy, Messier 87 has no distinctive dust lanes and it has an almost featureless, ellipsoidal shape that diminishes in luminosity with distance from the center. At the core is a supermassive black hole, which forms the primary component of an active galactic nucleus. This object is a strong source of multiwavelength radiation, particularly radio waves. A jet of energetic plasma originates at the core and extends outward at least 1,500 parsecs (5,000 light-years).