Wow, that's some terrible reporting.
The Messier 87 galaxy is 53.5 ± 1.63 Mly (megalight-years, ie millions of light years) away, which is about 5x1020 km, which is 500 quintillion. I guess that's what they mean.
A trillion has 12 zeroes, and a million has 6, so a "million trillion" is kind of a quintillion (18).
It's 300 sextillion smoots. So that's nice.
Try the astronomy.com article for a bit more sense.
(, Wed 10 Apr 2019, 17:21, Share, Reply)