Rare black hole 48 EP

XTE J1650-500

RA 252.5041° · Dec -49.9621° · blackhole

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Score breakdown

· 4 badges

48 pts · Rare

Rare 50 pts → Epic

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

Total score 48

2 more points to reach Epic.

Badges

Black hole · +26
Distant (over 1,000 light-years) · +6
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 612 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 13.9 km out, making the horizon about 27.8 km across.

Properties

accreting: yes
bh class: stellar
constellation: Ara
dist ly: 8500
first imaged: no
gw detection: no
host galaxy: Milky Way
is sgr a: no
mass solar: 4.7
name: XTE J1650-500
named: no
schwarzschild km: 13.884
spin: 0.79
xray binary: yes

Nearby objects

About XTE J1650-500

XTE J1650-500 is a rare black hole. It lies about 8,500 light-years from Earth and sits in the constellation Ara.

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 XTE J1650-500 in the constellation Ara.

Like any astronomical target, XTE J1650-500 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 XTE J1650-500 is a rare black hole

XTE J1650-500 scores 48 points on Spacedle's rarity scale, which places it in the rare tier. Another 2 points would lift it into a rarer tier.

That score comes from 4 science badges — Black hole, Distant (over 1,000 light-years), 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.