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Epic black hole 70 EP

LMC X-1

RA 84.9118° · Dec -69.7433° · blackhole

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Score breakdown

· 6 badges
70 pts · Epic
Epic 78 pts → Anomaly
  • Black hole +26
  • Spinning near the limit +14
  • X-ray binary: stripping a living star +10
  • Has a proper name +8
  • Outside our galaxy entirely +6
  • Stellar-mass black hole +6
Total score 70

8 more points to reach Anomaly.

Badges

  • Black hole · +26
  • Outside our galaxy entirely · +6
  • Has a proper name · +8
  • Stellar-mass black hole · +6
  • X-ray binary: stripping a living star · +10
  • Spinning near the limit · +14

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 810 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 Large Magellanic Cloud.
  • 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. Beyond the Milky Way's disc entirely, out among its satellite galaxies.
  • Its event horizon. The point of no return sits 32.2 km out, making the horizon about 64.4 km across.

Properties

accreting
yes
bh class
stellar
constellation
Dor
dist ly
163000
first imaged
no
gw detection
no
host galaxy
Large Magellanic Cloud
is sgr a
no
mass solar
10.9
name
LMC X-1
named
yes
schwarzschild km
32.199
spin
0.92
xray binary
yes

About LMC X-1

LMC X-1 is an epic black hole. It lies about 163,000 light-years from Earth and sits in the constellation Dor.

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 LMC X-1 in the constellation Dor.

Like any astronomical target, LMC X-1 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 LMC X-1 is an epic black hole

LMC X-1 scores 70 points on Spacedle's rarity scale, which places it in the epic tier. Another 8 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, Stellar-mass black hole, X-ray binary: stripping a living star and Spinning near the limit — 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.