Epic black hole 74 EP

Centaurus A

RA 201.3651° · Dec -43.0191° · blackhole

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Score breakdown

· 6 badges

74 pts · Epic

Epic 78 pts → Anomaly

Black hole +26
Supermassive black hole +16
Firing a relativistic jet +12
Has a proper name +8
Outside our galaxy entirely +6
Actively feeding +6

Total score 74

4 more points to reach Anomaly.

Badges

Black hole · +26
Outside our galaxy entirely · +6
Has a proper name · +8
Supermassive black hole · +16
Actively feeding · +6
Firing a relativistic jet · +12

Trivia

What makes it special

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

Mass. It weighs about 55 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.
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 NGC 5128 (Centaurus A).
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.

Properties

accreting: yes
bh class: supermassive
constellation: Cen
dist ly: 12000000
first imaged: no
gw detection: no
host galaxy: NGC 5128 (Centaurus A)
is sgr a: no
jet: yes
mass solar: 55000000
name: Centaurus A
named: yes
schwarzschild km: 162470425.507

Nearby objects

About Centaurus A

Centaurus A is an epic black hole. It lies about 12,000,000 light-years from Earth and sits in the constellation Cen.

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.

How to see it

Look for Centaurus A in the constellation Cen.

Like any astronomical target, Centaurus A 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 Centaurus A is an epic black hole

Centaurus A scores 74 points on Spacedle's rarity scale, which places it in the epic tier. Another 4 points would lift it into a rarer tier.

That score comes from 6 science badges — Black hole, Outside our galaxy entirely, Has a proper name, Supermassive black hole, 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.