One of the best things about modern astronomy is that we can
“see” with our instruments a whole lot that our eyes could never
see. This very cool new image from the Chandra X-Ray
Observatory, along with a radio image from the Very Large Array,
shows the galaxy-altering power of the active supermassive black
hole in the center of M87. M87 is a massive elliptical galaxy at
the center of the nearby Virgo Cluster. The Virgo Cluster of
galaxies is like the nearby metropolis to which our galaxy
resides in the distant suburbs. Known for a long time to be a
powerful radio source, it was found to have a supermassive black
hole that was feeding on surrounding gas. Although a few billion
times the mass of the sun — which is HUGE to us — it is just a
tiny fraction of the mass of the galaxy. And yet, its actions
influence the entire galaxy, as well as the cluster around it.
Whereas the radio emission comes from jets of material that are
flung away from the black hole’s vicinity at speeds nearing that
of light, the x-ray e