Anomaly black hole 86 EP

Cygnus A (3C 405)

RA 299.8682° · Dec 40.7339° · blackhole

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Score breakdown

· 6 badges

86 pts · Anomaly

Anomaly 120 pts → Mythic

Monster: over a billion Suns +28
Black hole +26
Firing a relativistic jet +12
Has a proper name +8
Outside our galaxy entirely +6
Actively feeding +6

Total score 86

34 more points to reach Mythic.

Badges

Black hole · +26
Outside our galaxy entirely · +6
Has a proper name · +8
Monster: over a billion Suns · +28
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

Ultramassive. In the heaviest class of black hole known — a billion Suns or more in a single object.
Mass. It weighs about 2.5 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.
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 Cygnus A (3C 405).
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: Cyg
dist ly: 760000000
first imaged: no
gw detection: no
host galaxy: Cygnus A (3C 405)
is sgr a: no
jet: yes
mass solar: 2500000000
name: Cygnus A (3C 405)
named: yes
schwarzschild km: 7385019341.228

Nearby objects

About Cygnus A (3C 405)

Cygnus A (3C 405) is an anomaly black hole. It lies about 760,000,000 light-years from Earth and sits in the constellation Cyg.

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 Cygnus A (3C 405) in the constellation Cyg.

Like any astronomical target, Cygnus A (3C 405) 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 Cygnus A (3C 405) is an anomaly black hole

Cygnus A (3C 405) scores 86 points on Spacedle's rarity scale, which places it in the anomaly tier. Another 34 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, Monster: over a billion Suns, 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.