BellaOnline Forums Education Astronomy Virgo the Maiden

Virgo is one of the constellations of the zodiac, and its stars have been linked to agricultural goddesses for thousands of years. This area of sky contains thousands of galaxies, dozens of known extrasolar planets, and is where the first quasar was discovered.

Virgo the Maiden

One of the many galaxies in Virgo is M61, a beautiful spiral galaxy. It's classified as a starburst galaxy because of its high rate of star formation and numbers of supernovae.

The Virgo Cluster is an enormous cluster of galaxies, containing 1500 or more galaxies. The Milky Way, by contrast, is part of the Local Group which just over fifty known galaxies. Here is an image showing part of the Virgo Cluster, with larger galaxies labelled.

Exoplanet GJ 504b is one of the many known planets in Virgo. The planet is younger than the Solar System planets and still glowing with the heat of its creation. Scientists think that if we could see it, it would be a magenta color because of this heat.

Here is spiral galaxy NGC 4845. It's over 65 million light years away in the constellation Virgo. There's notable spiral structure, and a dusty disk surrounding a bright central bulge.

At the center of the galaxy is a supermassive black hole that acts on the innermost stars. They're travelling around the galactic center must faster than they would be with no black hole. Judging by the speed of these stars, the black hole has a mass equal to hundreds of thousands of stars the mass of our Sun.

Credit:
ESA/Hubble & NASA and S. Smartt (Queen's University Belfast)

Look into the eyes of the maiden. The VLT (Very Large Telescope) has imaged The Eyes, a pair of galaxies NGC 4438 and NGC 4435. They're located in the constellation Virgo (the Maiden).



Credit: ESO

The sky is limitless in its artistic presentations.