Composite Hubble Space Telescope image of the Messier 87 (M87) elliptical galaxy. The blue jet near the centre is a supermassive black hole-powered stream of material being ejected from M87?檚 core. As gaseous material from the centre of the galaxy accretes onto the black hole, the energy released produces a stream of subatomic particles that are accelerated to velocities near the speed of light. M87 is made up of several trillion stars, the supermassive black hole and a family of roughly 15,000 globular star clusters. M87 is the dominant member of the neighbouring Virgo cluster of galaxies, which contains some 2,000 galaxies. Discovered in 1781 by Charles Messier, this galaxy is located 54 million light-years away from Earth in the constellation Virgo. This image is a composite of individual observations in visible and infrared light taken by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope.