A real black hole

3C 273

The first quasar identified, and the brightest in our sky.

In 1963 Maarten Schmidt measured this radio source's light and found it was two billion light years away, yet as bright as a nearby star. It was the first quasar: a black hole feeding so fast that the disc of hot gas swirling into it outshines its whole galaxy. A jet streams out of it, pointed nearly at us.

How we draw it today

These are stills from the program that draws every black hole on BlackHoles.fyi, worked out from what astronomers have measured about 3C 273: its mass and, where they are known, its spin and how fast it feeds. The site is open to a small group of testers while we finish it; signed in, they see these same views drawn live and can move between them.

  • 3C 273, Side on: a still from BlackHoles.fyi
    Side on
  • 3C 273, Low angle: a still from BlackHoles.fyi
    Low angle
  • 3C 273, From above: a still from BlackHoles.fyi
    From above
  • 3C 273, Close: a still from BlackHoles.fyi
    Close
  • 3C 273, Far: a still from BlackHoles.fyi
    Far
  • 3C 273, As seen from Earth: a still from BlackHoles.fyi
    As seen from Earth
  • 3C 273, Jet: a still from BlackHoles.fyi
    Jet

Drawn live, it can also be turned, and you can change how fast it spins and feeds.

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Where the numbers come from

There is no catalogue of black holes as such, as far as we know. A hole goes by the name of something we can see: the star orbiting it, the X-ray source, the galaxy around it. When two black holes merge into one, the new hole is named for the date the ripple in space from the merger (its gravitational waves) reached the detectors on Earth that listen for them. SIMBAD is astronomers' online catalogue of objects beyond the Solar System. NED is NASA's catalogue of objects beyond our Galaxy. Known as: in SIMBAD, 3C 273, PG 1226+023, 4C 02.32 and PKS 1226+02; in NED, 3C 273.

  • Mass, in M☉ (the Sun's mass): 2.6 × 10⁸ ± 1.1 × 10⁸ M☉, from the rotation of the broad-line gas, resolved by the GRAVITY interferometer on the VLT. GRAVITY Collaboration, “Spatially resolved rotation of the broad-line region of a quasar at sub-parsec scale”, Nature 563, 657 (2018). doi:10.1038/s41586-018-0731-9, arXiv:1811.11195
  • Spin, a* (0 is still, 1 is the fastest a hole can turn): No published measurement that we could find.
  • Spin drawn: 0.6, the value the homepage picture starts on. We found no published value, so this is an assumption.
  • Feed: 1.2, from the light of the accretion disc, from the disc model fitted to its spectrum, over the Eddington luminosity for about 3 × 10⁸ M☉. J. P. Thorne et al., “Accretion disc reverberation mapping of the quasar 3C 273”, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (2025), §4.1. doi:10.1093/mnras/staf258, arXiv:2502.08366
  • Angle: 12 ± 2°, from the inclination of the broad-line gas's rotation axis, at 90% confidence; the radio jet's own angle, from its superluminal motion, is 7° to 15°. GRAVITY Collaboration, “Spatially resolved rotation of the broad-line region of a quasar at sub-parsec scale”, Nature 563, 657 (2018). doi:10.1038/s41586-018-0731-9, arXiv:1811.11195
  • Distance: 2.2 × 10⁹ light years (675 Mpc), from comoving distance, worked out here from the redshift. Worked out here from the redshift for a flat universe with the Planck 2018 values (H₀ = 67.66 km/s/Mpc, Ωm = 0.3097): the comoving distance, how far the object is today. Its light is 2.05 billion years old. Planck Collaboration, “Planck 2018 results. VI. Cosmological parameters”, Astronomy & Astrophysics 641, A6 (2020). doi:10.1051/0004-6361/201833910
  • Redshift: 0.158339 ± 0.000067, from NED's preferred value. The NASA/IPAC Extragalactic Database (NED), object lookup, read 2026-10-31. https://ned.ipac.caltech.edu/
  • Apparent jet speed: it appears to move at 14.91 ± 0.16 times the speed of light; it only looks that fast because the jet points nearly at us, from how fast the quickest bright knot in the jet appears to move across the sky, tracked in 105 radio images taken between 1994 and 2019. M. L. Lister et al., “MOJAVE: XVIII. Kinematics and Inner Jet Evolution of Bright Radio-Loud Active Galaxies”, The Astrophysical Journal 923, 30 (2021), Table 7. doi:10.3847/1538-4357/ac230f, arXiv:2108.13358

Every number on this page is quoted from a published paper or a catalogue, with the method it came from. No image or data file from these sources is loaded, so there is nothing to licence; the figure is our own drawing from their numbers.

More real black holes we draw

  • Gaia BH1, a dormant black hole (one that is not feeding, so it gives off almost no light) with a Sun-like star circling it every 186 days
  • Gaia BH3, a dormant black hole with an old giant star on an 11.6-year orbit; the heaviest known black hole in our Galaxy to be born from a single star
  • GW150914 remnant, the black hole left when two black holes merged, the first such merger ever detected
  • TON 618, a quasar (a galaxy's core lit up by the black hole feeding at its centre), among the heaviest black holes known
  • Sagittarius A*, the black hole at the centre of our Galaxy
  • M87*, the black hole in the giant galaxy M87, the first to be pictured: a dark circle against the glowing gas around it
  • Cygnus X-1, a black hole feeding on the wind of a giant star, seen in two states
  • GRS 1915+105, a black hole that fed about as fast as a black hole can for 26 years, throwing out jets
  • V404 Cygni, a black hole that is quiet for decades, then flares