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Epic black hole 54 EP

Gaia BH3

RA 294.8250° · Dec 14.9316° · blackhole

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Score breakdown

· 5 badges
54 pts · Epic
Epic 78 pts → Anomaly
  • Black hole +26
  • Among the nearest black holes known +12
  • Distant (over 1,000 light-years) +6
  • Stellar-mass black hole +6
  • Dormant (nothing left to eat) +4
Total score 54

24 more points to reach Anomaly.

Badges

  • Black hole · +26
  • Distant (over 1,000 light-years) · +6
  • Stellar-mass black hole · +6
  • Dormant (nothing left to eat) · +4
  • Among the nearest black holes known · +12

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

  • Spaghettification. Its gravity pulls your feet so much harder than your head that you would be stretched into a thread roughly 1168 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.

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 96.6 km out, making the horizon about 193 km across.
  • Sense of scale. The whole horizon is only 193 km wide — a city-sized hole in the universe with the mass of stars inside it.

Properties

accreting
no
bh class
stellar
constellation
Aql
dist ly
1926
first imaged
no
gw detection
no
host galaxy
Milky Way
is sgr a
no
mass solar
32.7
name
Gaia BH3
named
no
schwarzschild km
96.596

Nearby objects

About Gaia BH3

Gaia BH3 is an epic black hole. It lies about 1,926 light-years from Earth and sits in the constellation Aql.

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 Gaia BH3 in the constellation Aql.

Like any astronomical target, Gaia BH3 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 Gaia BH3 is an epic black hole

Gaia BH3 scores 54 points on Spacedle's rarity scale, which places it in the epic tier. Another 24 points would lift it into a rarer tier.

That score comes from 5 science badges — Black hole, Distant (over 1,000 light-years), Stellar-mass black hole, Dormant (nothing left to eat) and Among the nearest black holes known — 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.