What is the distance between the Milky Way Galaxy and the Virgo Cluster?

Question

What is the distance between the Milky Way Galaxy and the Virgo Cluster?

Answer 1

The distance to the Virgo Cluster is about 55 million light years, at least to the central core of this 3,000 plus member cluster. There are numerous galaxies considerably closer and father away than that which are still definitely members of the Virgo Cluster. The bright and extremely massive galaxies M-87, M-86 and M-84 along with NGC galaxies of all sizes and types form the heart of this rich galaxy cluster of which the Local Group galaxies might be an outlying members. The Virgo Cluster extends from Coma Berenices through Virgo all the way to Corvus, and provides a fantastic hunting ground under dark skies for the owner of even small telescopes who wish to see galaxies of all types, including peculiar, colliding and active galaxies. The Virgo Cluster is rapidly moving out of view and will soon be inaccessible until next year, so if you want to look at any of these galaxies, do it now before they get lost in the glare of the Sun.

Answer 2

Its not a small discreet object light a star or even a single galaxy, so distances can be hard to quantify.

Most science sources state the Virgo Cluster is 59 +/-4 x 10^6 light years away.

Virgo has between 1300 and 2000 member galaxies, and they take up a lot of 3-dimensional space.

If we just look at M87, which is the huge elliptical galaxy near the cluster's centre (and considered the dominant galaxy), it is 52 +/- 4 x 10^6 light years away.

Answer 3

The Virgo Cluster is a cluster of galaxies at a distance of approximately 59 ± 4 Million light years away in the constellation Virgo.

Comprising approximately 1300 (and possibly up to 2000) member galaxies, the cluster forms the heart of the larger Local Supercluster, of which the Local Group is an outlying member. It is estimated that its mass is 1.2×1015 M out to 8 degrees of the cluster's center or a radius of about 2.2 Mpc.

Many of the brighter galaxies in this cluster, including the giant elliptical galaxy Messier 87, were discovered in the late 1770s and early 1780s and subsequently included in Charles Messier's catalogue of non-cometary fuzzy objects. Described by Messier as nebulae without stars, their true nature was not recognized until the 1920s.

The cluster subtends a maximum arc of approximately 8 degrees centered in the constellation Virgo. Many of the member galaxies of the cluster are visible with a small telescope.

The cluster is a fairly heterogeneous mixture of spirals and ellipticals. As of 2004, it is believed that the spirals of the cluster are distributed in an oblong prolate filament, approximately 4 times as long as wide, stretching along the line of sight from the Milky Way. The elliptical galaxies are more centrally concentrated than the spiral galaxies.