RA 237.7449° · Dec -56.4764° · blackhole
18 more points to reach Anomaly.
XTE J1550-564 is an epic black hole. It lies about 15,000 light-years from Earth and sits in the constellation Nor.
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.
Look for XTE J1550-564 in the constellation Nor.
Like any astronomical target, XTE J1550-564 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.
XTE J1550-564 scores 60 points on Spacedle's rarity scale, which places it in the epic tier. Another 18 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, X-ray binary: stripping a living star and Firing a relativistic jet — 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.