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Epic black hole 56 EP

4U 1543-47 (IL Lupi)

RA 236.7858° · Dec -47.6694° · 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 771 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 27.8 km out, making the horizon about 55.5 km across.

Properties

accreting
yes
bh class
stellar
constellation
Lup
dist ly
24000
first imaged
no
gw detection
no
host galaxy
Milky Way
is sgr a
no
mass solar
9.4
name
4U 1543-47 (IL Lupi)
named
yes
schwarzschild km
27.768
spin
0.8
xray binary
yes

Nearby objects

About 4U 1543-47 (IL Lupi)

4U 1543-47 (IL Lupi) is an epic black hole. It lies about 24,000 light-years from Earth and sits in the constellation Lup.

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 4U 1543-47 (IL Lupi) in the constellation Lup.

Like any astronomical target, 4U 1543-47 (IL Lupi) 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 4U 1543-47 (IL Lupi) is an epic black hole

4U 1543-47 (IL Lupi) 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.