Epic black hole 65 EP

Sombrero (M104)

RA 189.9976° · Dec -11.6231° · blackhole

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Score breakdown

· 6 badges

65 pts · Epic

Epic 78 pts → Anomaly

Black hole +26
Supermassive black hole +16
Has a proper name +8
Outside our galaxy entirely +6
Actively feeding +6
On the zodiac +3

Total score 65

13 more points to reach Anomaly.

Badges

Black hole · +26
Outside our galaxy entirely · +6
Has a proper name · +8
On the zodiac · +3
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

Ultramassive. In the heaviest class of black hole known — a billion Suns or more in a single object.
Mass. It weighs about 1 billion 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 Sombrero Galaxy (M104).
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: Vir
dist ly: 29300000
first imaged: no
gw detection: no
host galaxy: Sombrero Galaxy (M104)
is sgr a: no
mass solar: 1000000000
name: Sombrero (M104)
named: yes
schwarzschild km: 2954007736.491

Nearby objects

About Sombrero (M104)

Sombrero (M104) is an epic black hole. It lies about 29,300,000 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 Sombrero (M104) in the constellation Vir.

Like any astronomical target, Sombrero (M104) 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 Sombrero (M104) is an epic black hole

Sombrero (M104) scores 65 points on Spacedle's rarity scale, which places it in the epic tier. Another 13 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, On the zodiac, 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.