Messier 87 Galaxy
- Distance From Earth: 53 million Lightyears
- Number Of Stars: 1 Trillion+
While Messier 87 is a supergiant galaxy with more than one trillion stars, it is seemingly in a backyard compared to the distance of other galaxies. It’s a little over 50 million lightyears from Earth. Which is pretty close compared to other galaxies out there. Scientists used this closeness to their advantage a short time ago. The galaxy has a supermassive black hole at its center, like many other galaxies. Scientists managed to capture an image of this black hole, the very first image of a true black hole ever! Their black hole happens to be 6.5 billion times the mass of our sun, which is crazy to think about.
Being roughly 53 million lightyears from us, alien worlds present there would be seeing the Earth in one of its best periods of change. India collided with Asia, leading to the formation of the Himalayas. The Azolla Event happened around this time as well. This was a period in which freshwater fern Azolla bloomed in the Arctic Ocean. The Azolla sank to the seafloor, becoming incorporated in the sediment there. That led to carbon dioxide reducing, taking away the “Greenhouse Earth.” Palm Trees and amphibians could now properly live at the poles. However, the North and South Poles would turn glacial in the “Icehouse Earth.”