Epic black hole 68 EP

SS 433 (V1343 Aquilae)

RA 287.9565° · Dec 4.9828° · blackhole

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Score breakdown

· 6 badges

68 pts · Epic

Epic 78 pts → Anomaly

Black hole +26
Firing a relativistic jet +12
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 68

10 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
Firing a relativistic jet · +12

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 589 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.
Its jet. It fires a beam of plasma out along its spin axis at very nearly the speed of light — a jet that can reach further from the galaxy than the galaxy itself is wide.

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.

Properties

accreting: yes
bh class: stellar
constellation: Aql
dist ly: 18000
first imaged: no
gw detection: no
host galaxy: Milky Way
is sgr a: no
jet: yes
mass solar: 4.2
name: SS 433 (V1343 Aquilae)
named: yes
schwarzschild km: 12.407
xray binary: yes

Nearby objects

About SS 433 (V1343 Aquilae)

SS 433 (V1343 Aquilae) is an epic black hole. It lies about 18,000 light-years from Earth and sits in the constellation Aql.

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 SS 433 (V1343 Aquilae) in the constellation Aql.

Like any astronomical target, SS 433 (V1343 Aquilae) 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 SS 433 (V1343 Aquilae) is an epic black hole

SS 433 (V1343 Aquilae) scores 68 points on Spacedle's rarity scale, which places it in the epic tier. Another 10 points would lift it into a rarer tier.

That score comes from 6 science badges — Black hole, Distant (over 1,000 light-years), Has a proper name, 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.