Black holes and extremes
Black holes, pulsars and the remains of exploded stars. None can be seen directly with backyard equipment, but SkyMate can show you where they are.
Black holes
Regions where gravity is so strong that not even light escapes. We find them by their effect on nearby stars and gas.
Pulsars
Spinning neutron stars, the collapsed cores of exploded stars, sweeping beams of radio waves past Earth many times a second.
Remnants
The expanding debris of a supernova. Unlike black holes and pulsars, the brightest remnants can be seen in a telescope.
Looking toward the invisible
The supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy, Sagittarius A*, lies behind the bright star clouds of Sagittarius. From a dark site in summer you can look straight toward it, even though dust hides the galactic center itself from optical telescopes. Cygnus X-1 orbits a blue supergiant star that binoculars show easily; the black hole is its unseen partner.
The Crab Pulsar sits inside the Crab Nebula, the remnant of a supernova recorded by astronomers in 1054. A small telescope shows the nebula as a faint oval glow; the pulsar itself, around magnitude 16, is beyond small telescopes.
More: nebulae, exoplanets.