Epic black hole 67 EP

NGC 3842

RA 176.0088° · Dec 19.9498° · blackhole

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Score breakdown

· 5 badges

67 pts · Epic

Epic 78 pts → Anomaly

Monster: over a billion Suns +28
Black hole +26
Outside our galaxy entirely +6
Dormant (nothing left to eat) +4
On the zodiac +3

Total score 67

11 more points to reach Anomaly.

Badges

Black hole · +26
Outside our galaxy entirely · +6
On the zodiac · +3
Monster: over a billion Suns · +28
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

Ultramassive. In the heaviest class of black hole known — a billion Suns or more in a single object.
Mass. It weighs about 9.7 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 NGC 3842 (Leo Cluster).
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. Deep in the extragalactic distance — further than the entire Virgo Cluster of galaxies.

Properties

accreting: no
bh class: supermassive
constellation: Leo
dist ly: 331000000
first imaged: no
gw detection: no
host galaxy: NGC 3842 (Leo Cluster)
is sgr a: no
mass solar: 9700000000
name: NGC 3842
named: no
schwarzschild km: 28653875043.964

Nearby objects

About NGC 3842

NGC 3842 is an epic black hole. It lies about 331,000,000 light-years from Earth and sits in the constellation Leo.

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 NGC 3842 in the constellation Leo.

Like any astronomical target, NGC 3842 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 3842 is an epic black hole

NGC 3842 scores 67 points on Spacedle's rarity scale, which places it in the epic tier. Another 11 points would lift it into a rarer tier.

That score comes from 5 science badges — Black hole, Outside our galaxy entirely, On the zodiac, Monster: over a billion Suns 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.