Type

Supermassive

Location

In the constellation Virgo

Distance

2 billion light-years (765 megaparsecs)

Mass

Roughly 1 billion times the mass of the Sun

Size

Diameter roughly equal to the size of our solar system

Discovery Methods

• Detection of an accretion disk

This Hubble Space Telescope image is the best picture to date of 3C 273. A jet of gas (streak at top left) expelled from the accretion disk around the black hole is about 200,000 light-years long. [NASA/ESA]

This document was last modified: March 27, 2017.