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Epic black hole 56 EP

A0620-00 (V616 Monocerotis)

RA 95.6856° · Dec -0.3458° · blackhole

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Score breakdown

· 5 badges
56 pts · Epic
Epic 78 pts → Anomaly
  • Black hole +26
  • X-ray binary: stripping a living star +10
  • Has a proper name +8
  • Distant (over 1,000 light-years) +6
  • Stellar-mass black hole +6
Total score 56

22 more points to reach Anomaly.

Badges

  • Black hole · +26
  • Distant (over 1,000 light-years) · +6
  • Has a proper name · +8
  • Stellar-mass black hole · +6
  • X-ray binary: stripping a living star · +10

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.

Handle with care

  • Spaghettification. Its gravity pulls your feet so much harder than your head that you would be stretched into a thread roughly 685 km out — long before you ever reached the horizon.
  • 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. A stellar-mass black hole: what is left behind when a star far heavier than the Sun exhausts its fuel and its core collapses in less than a second.
  • It is eating a star. It is stripping a living star: gas peels off its companion and spirals in, heated so fiercely on the way down that the disc glows in X-rays.

Sense of scale

  • In perspective. Far away by human standards, yet still a local address inside the Milky Way's spiral arms.
  • Its event horizon. The point of no return sits 19.5 km out, making the horizon about 39 km across.

Properties

accreting
yes
bh class
stellar
constellation
Mon
dist ly
3300
first imaged
no
gw detection
no
host galaxy
Milky Way
is sgr a
no
mass solar
6.6
name
A0620-00 (V616 Monocerotis)
named
yes
schwarzschild km
19.496
spin
0.12
xray binary
yes

Nearby objects

About A0620-00 (V616 Monocerotis)

A0620-00 (V616 Monocerotis) is an epic black hole. It lies about 3,300 light-years from Earth and sits in the constellation Mon.

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 A0620-00 (V616 Monocerotis) in the constellation Mon.

Like any astronomical target, A0620-00 (V616 Monocerotis) 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 A0620-00 (V616 Monocerotis) is an epic black hole

A0620-00 (V616 Monocerotis) scores 56 points on Spacedle's rarity scale, which places it in the epic tier. Another 22 points would lift it into a rarer tier.

That score comes from 5 science badges — Black hole, Distant (over 1,000 light-years), Has a proper name, Stellar-mass black hole and X-ray binary: stripping a living star — 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.