The brightest galaxy in the Virgo cluster is Messier 87 (M87), which became famous in 2019 thanks to the publication of a “photograph” of its central supermassive black hole — the first ever taken of an object of its type.
This was made possible by the international Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) collaboration, a series of observatories and telescopes that together act as one large global telescope.
M87’s supermassive black hole, called M87*, is characterized by a powerful jet of hot gas escaping into space at relativistic speeds. In April 2018, a new EHT observing campaign involving more than 25 ground-based and orbiting telescopes observed a gamma-ray burst from M87*’s jet, the first in more than a decade.