![]() "Let's assume the very first stars formed black holes around 200 million years after the Big Bang," Smethurst says. In fact, collapsed stars grow so slowly, they couldn't possibly become supermassive just by absorbing new material. They are surprisingly inefficient at accreting (physicists' jargon for "sucking up") surrounding material, even in a dense galactic core. In reality, however, black holes don't live up to their monstrous reputation. Mystery solved, one might think – supermassive black holes are simply the hungriest and oldest of their kind. They barrel through the Universe sucking up everything in their path, growing larger and more voracious as they do. In popular culture, black holes are perfectly dark and endlessly hungry. The idea of black holes has been around for a century and is predicted in Albert Einstein's Theory of General Relativity. A dying star runs out of fuel, explodes in a supernova, collapses in on itself, and becomes so dense that even light cannot escape its intense gravity. There's little secret about how conventional – if they can be called that – black holes form and grow. But new techniques that look for the effects supermassive black holes have on the interstellar objects around them, and even at the ripples they create in the fabric of space and time, are providing new clues. Studying something that, by its nature is so dense that even light cannot escape from its centre, makes learning about it difficult. "The prettiest galaxies are the ones that could help us solve the mystery of how these black holes grow." "The ideal galaxies for my study are the most beautiful, perfect spirals you could possibly think of," says Becky Smethurst, a junior research fellow at the University of Oxford who studies supermassive black holes. This is where galaxy UCG 11700 could prove useful. Scientists believe almost every large galaxy has a supermassive black hole at its heart. While standard black holes start at around four times the mass of our Sun, their enormous relatives are millions, and sometimes billions, of times as massive. At the heart of this beautiful cosmic Catherine wheel is one of the most mysterious objects in the Universe – a supermassive black hole. For billions of years, the flocculent spiral arms of galaxy UCG 11700 have wheeled in peace, undisturbed by the collisions and mergers that have deformed so many other galaxies.īut while a spiral galaxy like UCG 11700 is pleasing to look at, something monstrous lurks in its midst. Watch this video to see how these supersized black holes compare to each other and to our solar system.Halfway between the belly of Delphinus the Dolphin and the hind hoof of Pegasus the flying horse, a pristine pinwheel tumbles through space. It is located 26,000 light years from Earth. The black hole at the centre of our home galaxy is called Sagittarius A* and it boasts the weight of 4.3 million Suns. The movie begins with 1601+3113, a dwarf galaxy hosting a black hole packed with the mass of 100,000 Suns, and ends with TON 618, a behemoth containing more than 60 billion solar masses. Despite being thousands or even billions of times more massive than our sun, these black holes are located far away from us, in the distant corners of our galaxy or beyond. It's worth noting that there are no massive black holes anywhere near our solar system. ![]() From the smallest to the largest ever observed, the above animation provides a stunning visual representation of the vastness of these cosmic behemoths lurking in the centers of most big galaxies, including our own Milky Way. ![]() This means that we can't see black holes directly, but rather we can observe their effects on nearby matter, such as gas and stars.Īs part of the Black Hole Week celebrations, NASA has shared an animation that showcases the "super" in ten supermassive black holes in the universe. To begin with, black holes are objects in space where the gravitational pull is so strong that nothing, not even light, can escape. This whole week (May 1 to May 5, 2023), the agency will be sharing information about these strange cosmic balls of gravity through videos, pictures, sonifications or stories. NASA is celebrating Black Hole Week - a special week-long celebration dedicated to one of the most intriguing and mysterious objects in the universe. Video Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center Conceptual Image Lab
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