Anomaly black hole 83 EP

3C 273

RA 187.2779° · Dec 2.0524° · blackhole

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Score breakdown

· 6 badges

83 pts · Anomaly

Anomaly 120 pts → Mythic

Black hole +26
Quasar: outshining its whole galaxy +20
Supermassive black hole +16
Firing a relativistic jet +12
Outside our galaxy entirely +6
On the zodiac +3

Total score 83

37 more points to reach Mythic.

Badges

Black hole · +26
Outside our galaxy entirely · +6
On the zodiac · +3
Supermassive black hole · +16
Quasar: outshining its whole galaxy · +20
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 890 million times as much as the Sun, all of it crushed into a region with no surface and no size at all.
Quasar. The disc feeding it outshines every star in its host galaxy put together. Quasars are the brightest steady objects in the known universe, visible clear across the observable cosmos.

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 3C 273 (host quasar).
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.

Properties

accreting: yes
bh class: supermassive
constellation: Vir
dist ly: 2400000000
first imaged: no
gw detection: no
host galaxy: 3C 273 (host quasar)
is sgr a: no
jet: yes
mass solar: 890000000
name: 3C 273
named: no
quasar: yes
redshift: 0.158
schwarzschild km: 2629066885.477

Nearby objects

About 3C 273

3C 273 is an anomaly black hole. It lies about 2.40×10^9 light-years from Earth and sits in the constellation Vir.

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 3C 273 in the constellation Vir.

Like any astronomical target, 3C 273 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 3C 273 is an anomaly black hole

3C 273 scores 83 points on Spacedle's rarity scale, which places it in the anomaly tier. Another 37 points would lift it into a rarer tier.

That score comes from 6 science badges — Black hole, Outside our galaxy entirely, On the zodiac, Supermassive black hole, Quasar: outshining its whole galaxy 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.