Black holes are one of the biggest mysteries of the cosmos that scientists have been trying to solve for years. Besides, these black holes are also the most violent objects known in the universe. Their gravity is so strong that not even light can escape them and they have the power to rip apart entire stars.
The more mass tucked into a small space, the stronger the gravitational pull will be. If the mass of the Earth is shrunk to an inch, it would also become a black hole. But an actual black hole is very huge in size and packs way more mass than Earth. So how do they become so big?
Black holes can eat up several Suns
Black holes can be divided into three categories – the smallest are stellar black holes formed after a star explosion. But even a small black hole can have a mass equivalent to 11 Suns. The black hole located in the M33 galaxy has a mass equivalent to 15.7 Suns.
Second are the intermediate-mass black holes, which can have a mass of 400 Suns and could be around 1500 miles across. While this is very huge when compared to the Earth, it’s still not close to the sheer mass they carry.
There are black holes that are twice the size of Jupiter but have a mass of 47,000 Suns inside. Even this does not come close to the mass of supermassive black holes such as Sagittarius A*, which is located at the center of our Milky Way galaxy. It is spread across a region about 14.6 million miles in diameter.
Bigger than our solar system
The size of Sagittarius A* is the same as 168 Jupiters, but inside it has a mass equivalent to 4 million Suns combined. Even the Sagittarius A* is small when compared to other known supermassive black holes.
Our neighboring Andromeda galaxy has a black hole that is bigger than Jupiter’s orbit and has a mass to equal that of 140 million Suns. Even this is smaller than the one at the center of the Sombrero galaxy that is spread across 2 billion miles, which means it’s bigger than our solar system and has a mass of 660 million Suns. So, speaking of the biggest of them all, the supermassive black hole is 78 billion miles in diameter and has a mass equivalent to 21 billion Suns. Now that’s something really massive.
