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Epic black hole 54 EP

NGC 1068 (M77)

RA 40.6696° · Dec -0.0133° · blackhole

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Score breakdown

· 4 badges
54 pts · Epic
Epic 78 pts → Anomaly
  • Black hole +26
  • Supermassive black hole +16
  • Outside our galaxy entirely +6
  • Actively feeding +6
Total score 54

24 more points to reach Anomaly.

Badges

  • Black hole · +26
  • Outside our galaxy entirely · +6
  • Supermassive black hole · +16
  • Actively feeding · +6

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 17 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 NGC 1068 (Messier 77).
  • 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 50.2 million km out, making the horizon about 100.4 million km across.

Properties

accreting
yes
bh class
supermassive
constellation
Cet
dist ly
47000000
first imaged
no
gw detection
no
host galaxy
NGC 1068 (Messier 77)
is sgr a
no
mass solar
17000000
name
NGC 1068 (M77)
named
no
schwarzschild km
50218131.52

Nearby objects

About NGC 1068 (M77)

NGC 1068 (M77) is an epic black hole. It lies about 47,000,000 light-years from Earth and sits in the constellation Cet.

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 NGC 1068 (M77) in the constellation Cet.

Like any astronomical target, NGC 1068 (M77) 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 NGC 1068 (M77) is an epic black hole

NGC 1068 (M77) scores 54 points on Spacedle's rarity scale, which places it in the epic tier. Another 24 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 Actively feeding — 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.