Epic black hole 72 EP

NGC 6240

RA 253.2454° · Dec 2.4009° · blackhole

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Score breakdown

· 5 badges

72 pts · Epic

Epic 78 pts → Anomaly

Black hole +26
A bound pair of black holes +18
Supermassive black hole +16
Outside our galaxy entirely +6
Actively feeding +6

Total score 72

6 more points to reach Anomaly.

Badges

Black hole · +26
Outside our galaxy entirely · +6
Supermassive black hole · +16
Actively feeding · +6
A bound pair of black holes · +18

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.
A bound pair. It is not one black hole but two, orbiting each other and spiralling slowly inwards. When they finally merge they will ring spacetime like a struck bell.

Hard to believe

Mass. It weighs about 900 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 6240.
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: yes
bh class: supermassive
binary bh: yes
constellation: Oph
dist ly: 400000000
first imaged: no
gw detection: no
host galaxy: NGC 6240
is sgr a: no
mass solar: 900000000
name: NGC 6240
named: no
schwarzschild km: 2658606962.842

Nearby objects

About NGC 6240

NGC 6240 is an epic black hole. It lies about 400,000,000 light-years from Earth and sits in the constellation Oph.

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 6240 in the constellation Oph.

Like any astronomical target, NGC 6240 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 6240 is an epic black hole

NGC 6240 scores 72 points on Spacedle's rarity scale, which places it in the epic tier. Another 6 points would lift it into a rarer tier.

That score comes from 5 science badges — Black hole, Outside our galaxy entirely, Supermassive black hole, Actively feeding and A bound pair of black holes — 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.