Mythic black hole 123 EP

M87*

RA 187.7059° · Dec 12.3911° · blackhole

Real photograph of M87* — Event Horizon Telescope, uploader cropped and converted TIF to JPG (CC BY 4.0)

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Score breakdown

· 8 badges

123 pts · Mythic

Mythic Top tier reached ✦

The one we photographed +34
Monster: over a billion Suns +28
Black hole +26
Firing a relativistic jet +12
Has a proper name +8
Outside our galaxy entirely +6
Actively feeding +6
On the zodiac +3

Total score 123

Badges

Black hole · +26
Outside our galaxy entirely · +6
Has a proper name · +8
On the zodiac · +3
The one we photographed · +34
Monster: over a billion Suns · +28
Actively feeding · +6
Firing a relativistic jet · +12

Trivia

What makes it special

We photographed it. The Event Horizon Telescope linked radio dishes across the whole planet into one virtual telescope the size of Earth, and produced humanity's first direct picture of a black hole's shadow.
It is feeding. Gas spiralling in is squeezed and heated to millions of degrees before it falls, so the disc around it blazes brighter than anything else in the neighbourhood.

Hard to believe

Ultramassive. In the heaviest class of black hole known — a billion Suns or more in a single object.
Mass. It weighs about 6.5 billion times as much as the Sun, all of it crushed into a region with no surface and no size at all.

Handle with care

A gentle crossing. It is so vast that the stretching is mild at the horizon: you would cross the point of no return entirely intact, feeling nothing, with no way of knowing you had done it.
No way back. Cross the event horizon and every path you could possibly take leads inwards. It is not that you cannot go fast enough — it is that 'out' has stopped being a direction.
Its jet. It fires a beam of plasma out along its spin axis at very nearly the speed of light — a jet that can reach further from the galaxy than the galaxy itself is wide.

What it actually is

Where it lives. It sits at the very heart of Messier 87 (Virgo A).

Properties

accreting: yes
bh class: supermassive
constellation: Vir
dist ly: 53500000
first imaged: yes
gw detection: no
host galaxy: Messier 87 (Virgo A)
is sgr a: no
jet: yes
mass solar: 6500000000
name: M87*
named: yes
schwarzschild km: 19201050287.192

Nearby objects

About M87*

M87* is a mythic black hole. It lies about 53,500,000 light-years from Earth and sits in the constellation Vir.

The Event Horizon Telescope linked radio dishes across the whole planet into one virtual telescope the size of Earth, and produced humanity's first direct picture of a black hole's shadow.

How to see it

Look for M87* in the constellation Vir.

Like any astronomical target, M87* is best seen from a dark site away from city lights, and when it is above the horizon depends on your latitude and the time of year. The visibility panel above works out tonight's viewing window for your saved location.

Why M87* is a mythic black hole

M87* scores 123 points on Spacedle's rarity scale, which places it in the mythic tier.

That score comes from 8 science badges — Black hole, Outside our galaxy entirely, Has a proper name, On the zodiac, The one we photographed, Monster: over a billion Suns, Actively feeding and Firing a relativistic jet — each earned for a real, measurable property of the object. Rarity on Spacedle is never random: the more remarkable an object's astrophysics, the more badges it collects, the higher it scores, and the rarer it ranks.