Messier 60

7 ', 4 × 6 ', 0

Messier 60 (also known as NGC 4649 ) is a 8.8 like bright elliptical galaxy with an angular extent of 7 ', 4 x 6 ', 0, in the constellation Virgo.

M60 was discovered along with the nearby galaxies M58 and M59 in the observation of the comet of the year 1779. Johann Gottfried Köhler discovered the galaxy on April 11, Barnaba Oriani she discovered a day later and Charles Messier finally four days later independently. The galaxy is in the Virgo cluster of galaxies in addition to the most massive galaxy M87 and the brightest galaxy M49, the third giant elliptical galaxy and the main galaxy of the subgroup Virgo Cluster C. This group forming the easternmost portion of the galaxy cluster and M60 itself is the easternmost object of the Virgo cluster in the Messier catalog.

M60 has a diameter of about 120,000 light years and a mass of about 1 trillion solar masses. In the Hubble sequence, the galaxy is of type E2, slightly flattened. M60 has approximately 5,000 globular clusters a relatively densely populated halo. An interesting detail even in a small telescope is the close companion NGC 4647, a spiral galaxy. It was suspected that the two galaxies interact gravitationally with each other and summarized them under Arp 116; However, recent studies do not confirm this.

On 28 January 2004 a supernova of type Ia ( SN 2004W ) with a brightness was greater than 18.8 in M60 likes discovered by the Lick Observatory Supernova Search ( LOSS ).

In early 2008, a team of American and Italian researchers to determine the mass of the black hole in the center of the galaxy. To this end, they measured using the X-ray satellite Chandra, the temperature of the hot gas in the center of M60, from which one can indirectly infer the mass of the black hole ( the hotter the gas, the more massive the black hole ). This, therefore, is home to a black hole with a mass of 3.4 billion solar masses, which corresponds to more than one thousand times the black hole at the center of our Milky Way.