Epic black hole 67 EP

Messier 60 (NGC 4649)

RA 190.9166° · Dec 11.5526° · 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 4.5 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.

What it actually is

Where it lives. It sits at the very heart of Messier 60 (NGC 4649).
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: Vir
dist ly: 55000000
first imaged: no
gw detection: no
host galaxy: Messier 60 (NGC 4649)
is sgr a: no
mass solar: 4500000000
name: Messier 60 (NGC 4649)
named: no
schwarzschild km: 13293034814.21

Nearby objects

About Messier 60 (NGC 4649)

Messier 60 (NGC 4649) is an epic black hole. It lies about 55,000,000 light-years from Earth and sits in the constellation Vir.

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 Messier 60 (NGC 4649) in the constellation Vir.

Like any astronomical target, Messier 60 (NGC 4649) 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 Messier 60 (NGC 4649) is an epic black hole

Messier 60 (NGC 4649) 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.