A video of the largest supermassive black holes revealed by NASA

2023-05-03 11:00:00

Black holes fascinate with their beauty and mysteries. The announcements of discoveries on the study of these cosmic giants are always a big noise. They are found at the center of almost all galaxies and they can vary in size. The smallest is still 100,000 times larger than our Sun and the largest is 60 billion times our Sun.

Through a press release, NASA explains that in the video are shown “10 supersized black holes that take center stage in their host galaxies, including the one in our Milky Way and M87”.

Nase explains that “any light passing through the event horizon – the black hole’s point of no return – is trapped forever, and any light passing nearby is redirected by the black hole’s intense gravity. Together, these effects produce a “shadow” regarding twice the size of the black hole’s actual event horizon.

Ten oversized black holes are shown in animation in the video. The camera pulls back from our Sun to compare larger and larger black holes to different structures in our solar system.

The black holes observed are therefore classified from smallest to largest:

• 1601 + 3113: in a dwarf galaxy hosting a black hole filled with a mass of 100,000 suns
• Sagittarius A* (pronounced ay-star): in our galaxy, it weighs 4.3 million suns
• two black holes in the galaxy NGC 7727: 6 million solar masses and more than 150 million suns, they might merge within 250 million years
• M87: in the galaxy of the same name and which weighs 5.4 billion suns
• TON 618: more than 60 billion solar masses, a quasar located at 10.4 billion light-years from Earth.

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