Right Ascension	12 : 43.7 (h:m)
Declination	+11 : 33 (deg:m)
Distance	60000 (kly)
Visual Brightness	8.8 (mag)
Apparent Dimension	7x6 (arc min)

Discovered 1779 by Johann Gottfried Koehler.

M60 is one of the giant elliptical galaxies in the Virgo Cluster of galaxies. As the most following (eastern) Messier galaxy in this cluster, it is the last in a row of 3 (M58, 59, and 60) which comes into the field of view of a telescope pointed to this region of the sky. At small magnifications, it lies in the same field of view as M59 (25 arc minutes away).

At its distance of some 60 million light years, this galaxy's apparent diameter of 7x6 arc minutes corresponds to a linear diameter of 120,000 light years. Amateur telescopes, however, do only show its bright central region of about 4x3 arc minutes diameter. Its visually 9th apparent magnitude makes it a very bright galaxy of absolute magnitude -22.3, corresponding to an intrinsic luminosity of 60 billion suns, substantially more than the 300 million quoted in Mallas/Kreimer's Messier album.

M60 is conspicuous in telescopes starting from 4 inch because of its faint neighbor, NGC 4647, shown in the image. For this peculiar property, Halton Arp has included M60 as No. 116 in his Catalogue of Peculiar Galaxies as an "Elliptical Close To and Perturbing a Spiral".

Photographs obtained with larger instruments, such as this one, show a large system of faint globular clusters; according to W.E. Harris' list, M60 has a respectable number of about 5100 of these objects in its halo.

The Hubble Space telescope has investigated M60's core and found evidence that it contans a massive central object of about 2 billion solar masses.

Observing Reports for M60 (IAAC Netastrocatalog)

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Hartmut Frommert (spider@seds.org)
Christine Kronberg (smil@lrz.uni-muenchen.de)

Last Modification: 9 Dec 1999, 22:58 MET