Object Analysis

Messier 60 (M60) is a giant elliptical galaxy in the constellation Virgo. It is the third-brightest elliptical in the Virgo Cluster and is located about 57 million light-years away. In a telescope, it is famous for being part of a striking pair with the nearby spiral galaxy NGC 4647.

M60 is a behemoth, containing roughly a trillion stars. It has a massive system of over 5,000 globular clusters. Despite being so close to NGC 4647, there was long a debate about whether they were interacting. Recent Hubble images have finally shown tidal distortion, proving that these two very different galaxies are beginning a slow gravitational dance.

At the heart of M60 is one of the most massive black holes known in the local universe, weighing in at 4.5 billion solar masses. M60 also hosts a "ultracompact dwarf" satellite galaxy, M60-UCD1, which is the densest known galaxy in the universe, packing 200 million stars into a space only 160 light-years across.