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A supermassive black hole (SMBH or sometimes SBH) [a] is the largest type of black hole, with its mass being on the order of hundreds of thousands, or millions to billions, of times the mass of the Sun (M ☉).
- How Big Are Supermassive Black Holes?
- Black Holes at The Center of Galaxies
- How Supermassive Black Holes Are Formed
- Additional Resources
- Bibliography
It’s impossible to observe a black hole directly, because — as their name suggests — they don’t emit any light or other radiation. But they can be detected via their gravitational effect on visible stars in their neighbourhood, which orbit around the black hole much faster than they would around a normal object of similar size. By measuring the spe...
Rather than devouring anything that ventures too close to them, the black holes at the centers of most galaxies only give away their existence through subtle effects on nearby stars. In an active galaxy, however, the supermassive black hole behaves a lot differently. When surrounded by a swirling "accretion disk" of rapidly rotating gas and dust, m...
Movies often portray black holes as giant cosmic vacuum cleaners, relentlessly sucking in other material until there’s nothing left. If that was how real black holes worked, there’d be no mystery as to where the supermassive kind came from: once an "ordinary" black hole had formed from stellar collapse, it would simply grow and grow until it reache...
For more information about black holes check out " Death by Black Hole - and Other Cosmic Quandaries" by Neil deGrasse Tyson and "Gravity's Fatal Attraction: Black Holes in the Universe" by Mitchell Begelman and Martin Rees.
Patchen Barss, "The mysterious origins of Universe's biggest black holes", BBC, August 2021. University of Texas in Austin, "History of Black Holes", accessed January 2022. Stephen Batttersby, "Monster munch: How did black holes get vast so fast?", New Scientist, March 2013. Alison Klesman, "What are primordial black holes?", Astronomy, July 2019. ...
Sep 8, 2020 · The supermassive black hole is located at the heart of a galaxy called M87, located about 55 million light-years away, and weighs more than 6 billion solar masses. Its event horizon extends so far it could encompass much of our solar system out to well beyond the planets.
Sep 13, 2024 · supermassive black hole (SMBH), a black hole more than one hundred thousand times the mass of the Sun. Nearly every large galaxy has a supermassive black hole at its centre. Active galactic nuclei, such as Seyfert galaxies and quasars, are powered by supermassive black holes.
- The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
Supermassive. Almost every large galaxy, including our Milky Way, has a supermassive black hole at its center. These monster objects have hundreds of thousands to billions of times the Sun’s mass, although some scientists place the lower boundary at tens of thousands.
May 1, 2023 · A new NASA animation highlights the “super” in supermassive black holes. These monsters lurk in the centers of most big galaxies, including our own Milky Way, and contain between 100,000 and tens of billions of times more mass than our Sun.
2 days ago · This supermassive black hole is the beating heart of the Milky Way, driving the formation and evolution of our galaxy for its entire 13 billion-year-history, helping to give rise to solar systems ...
