Epic black hole 60 EP

Andromeda P2 (M31*)

RA 10.6848° · Dec 41.2691° · blackhole

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Score breakdown

· 5 badges

60 pts · Epic

Epic 78 pts → Anomaly

Black hole +26
Supermassive black hole +16
Has a proper name +8
Outside our galaxy entirely +6
Dormant (nothing left to eat) +4

Total score 60

18 more points to reach Anomaly.

Badges

Black hole · +26
Outside our galaxy entirely · +6
Has a proper name · +8
Supermassive black hole · +16
Dormant (nothing left to eat) · +4

Trivia

What makes it special

Dormant. Nothing is falling into it right now, so it gives off no light of its own at all. It was found purely by what its gravity does to everything nearby.

Hard to believe

Mass. It weighs about 140 million 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.

What it actually is

Where it lives. It sits at the very heart of Andromeda Galaxy (M31).
What it is. A supermassive black hole. Practically every large galaxy has one, and how they grew so enormous so early in cosmic history is still an open question.

Sense of scale

In perspective. Further than Andromeda, the most distant thing the unaided human eye can see.
Its event horizon. The point of no return sits 413.6 million km out, making the horizon about 827.1 million km across.

Properties

accreting: no
bh class: supermassive
constellation: And
dist ly: 2537000
first imaged: no
gw detection: no
host galaxy: Andromeda Galaxy (M31)
is sgr a: no
mass solar: 140000000
name: Andromeda P2 (M31*)
named: yes
schwarzschild km: 413561083.109

Nearby objects

About Andromeda P2 (M31*)

Andromeda P2 (M31*) is an epic black hole. It lies about 2,537,000 light-years from Earth and sits in the constellation And.

Nothing is falling into it right now, so it gives off no light of its own at all. It was found purely by what its gravity does to everything nearby.

How to see it

Look for Andromeda P2 (M31*) in the constellation And.

Like any astronomical target, Andromeda P2 (M31*) 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 Andromeda P2 (M31*) is an epic black hole

Andromeda P2 (M31*) scores 60 points on Spacedle's rarity scale, which places it in the epic tier. Another 18 points would lift it into a rarer tier.

That score comes from 5 science badges — Black hole, Outside our galaxy entirely, Has a proper name, Supermassive black hole and Dormant (nothing left to eat) — 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.