The mass of the largest black holes is unimaginable.
Even a small black hole is extraordinarily dense and massive. If Earth were (hypothetically) crushed into a black hole, it would be less than an inch across. However, there are black holes in the universe that are larger than our solar system, and larger than the giant Andromeda galaxy.
The NASA video below, which was recently released by the agency’s Goddard Space Flight Center’s Conceptual Image Lab, shows the sheer size and mass of these remarkable cosmic objects. The greater the mass of an object, the stronger its gravitational pull. Black holes are so massive that not even light can escape from them.
NASA writes that this “new NASA animation highlights ‘super’ supermassive black holes”.(Opens in a new tab). “These monsters lie at the centers of most large galaxies, including our own Milky Way, and contain anywhere from 100,000 to tens of billions of times the mass of our sun.”
There is a black hole directed towards Earth. You are not in danger.
In just over 90 seconds, the animation will give you a tour of 10 black holes of increasing size.
When we see real (and extremely rare) images of black holes, or artistic conceptions of black holes, we don’t see the black hole devoid of light itself, but we can see very hot dust and gas rapidly rotating around the object, called an “accretion disk”. Some of this matter inevitably falls into the black hole, never to return; It is frequently ejected back into the universe, as black holes are not efficient consumers of galactic matter.
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“Black holes are bad at eating things. They are known to be selective eaters,” Douglas Goebel, an astrophysicist and black hole researcher at the University of Rhode Island, told Mashable last year.
“Black holes are terrible at eating things.”
One of the first black holes in the comparison video is Sagittarius A*, the black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy. It is as massive as about 4.3 million suns. The video ends with TON 618, which carries a weight More than 60 billion solar masses.
While black holes can be very massive and powerful, there is no reason to fear them, especially the most distant black holes in other distant galaxies.
“We tend to objectify these things,” astrophysicist Misty Bentz told Mashable after the first image of a black hole. “But really, black holes aren’t evil, or mean, or scary. They just…are.”