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Epic black hole 58 EP

Messier 15 IMBH

RA 322.4930° · Dec 12.1670° · blackhole

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Score breakdown

· 4 badges
58 pts · Epic
Epic 78 pts → Anomaly
  • Black hole +26
  • Intermediate-mass black hole (the missing link) +22
  • Distant (over 1,000 light-years) +6
  • Dormant (nothing left to eat) +4
Total score 58

20 more points to reach Anomaly.

Badges

  • Black hole · +26
  • Distant (over 1,000 light-years) · +6
  • Intermediate-mass black hole (the missing link) · +22
  • 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.

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 Milky Way.
  • What it is. An intermediate-mass black hole — the long-missing link between the star-sized ones and the giants at galactic centres. Only a handful are known anywhere.

Sense of scale

  • In perspective. Roughly as far as the centre of our galaxy — you're looking across the Milky Way.
  • Its event horizon. The point of no return sits 11.8 thousand km out, making the horizon about 23.6 thousand km across.
  • Sense of scale. Its event horizon is wider than the Earth.

Properties

accreting
no
bh class
intermediate
constellation
Peg
dist ly
33600
first imaged
no
gw detection
no
host galaxy
Milky Way
is sgr a
no
mass solar
4000
name
Messier 15 IMBH
named
no
schwarzschild km
11816.031

Nearby objects

About Messier 15 IMBH

Messier 15 IMBH is an epic black hole. It lies about 33,600 light-years from Earth and sits in the constellation Peg.

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 15 IMBH in the constellation Peg.

Like any astronomical target, Messier 15 IMBH 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 15 IMBH is an epic black hole

Messier 15 IMBH scores 58 points on Spacedle's rarity scale, which places it in the epic tier. Another 20 points would lift it into a rarer tier.

That score comes from 4 science badges — Black hole, Distant (over 1,000 light-years), Intermediate-mass black hole (the missing link) 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.