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Epic black hole 52 EP

M32*

RA 10.6743° · Dec 40.8652° · blackhole

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Score breakdown

· 4 badges
52 pts · Epic
Epic 78 pts → Anomaly
  • Black hole +26
  • Supermassive black hole +16
  • Outside our galaxy entirely +6
  • Dormant (nothing left to eat) +4
Total score 52

26 more points to reach Anomaly.

Badges

  • Black hole · +26
  • Outside our galaxy entirely · +6
  • 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 2.5 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 Messier 32.
  • 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 7.4 million km out, making the horizon about 14.8 million km across.

Properties

accreting
no
bh class
supermassive
constellation
And
dist ly
2530000
first imaged
no
gw detection
no
host galaxy
Messier 32
is sgr a
no
mass solar
2500000
name
M32*
named
no
schwarzschild km
7385019.341

Nearby objects

About M32*

M32* is an epic black hole. It lies about 2,530,000 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 M32* in the constellation And.

Like any astronomical target, M32* 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 M32* is an epic black hole

M32* scores 52 points on Spacedle's rarity scale, which places it in the epic tier. Another 26 points would lift it into a rarer tier.

That score comes from 4 science badges — Black hole, Outside our galaxy entirely, 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.