This seemingly innocuous, fuzzy globe is in fact one of the largest galaxies in the universe, the giant elliptical galaxy M87. Containing over a trillion stars, it is the gravitational center of the great Virgo Cluster in the constellation Virgo. The statistics for M87 are staggering: it is surrounded by 15,000 globular clusters (spherical clusters of 100,000 to 1 million stars each). Our Milky Way, in contrast, has only 130 globular clusters. The galaxy is also surrounded by an enormous cloud of hot x-ray emitting gas (30 million degrees Kelvin) with a mass equal to that of one trillion of our Suns. The galaxy is also surrounded by dark matter not detectable by ordinary methods that is 20 times the size of its x-ray gas cloud and 10 times as
