English: Messier 89 (M89) is one of eight galaxies in the Virgo cluster of galaxies that the famous French astronomer Charles Messier discovered in 1781. An elliptical galaxy by classification, M89 is one of only a few in this category that appear almost exactly circular. It is located about 50 million light-years away in the constellation Virgo.

M89 contains approximately 100 billion stars and well over 2,000 globular clusters. It was the first galaxy discovered to have an extended envelope, which means that it has a larger region of light surrounding it than other elliptical galaxies, most likely because of its high number of stars and globular clusters. At the center of M89 is a supermassive black hole estimated to have one billion times the mass of our Sun.

This Hubble image features about half the galaxy, with M89’s bright central nucleus at the top right of the image and many of its globular clusters appearing as star-like points of light throughout the field. The exposure also captures a separate edge-on spiral galaxy below M89’s core.

For more information, visit: www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2018/messier-89

Credit: NASA, ESA, STScI, M. Franx (Universiteit Leiden), and S. Faber (University of California, Santa Cruz)