NASA Animation Sizes Up the Biggest Black Holes
Editor's Note: A previous version of this video mislabeled the orbit of Saturn as the orbit of Jupiter. This 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.
Any light crossing the event horizon - the black hole' s point of no return - becomes trapped forever, and any light passing close to it is redirected by the black hole' s intense gravity. Together, these effects produce a shadow about twice the size of the black hole' s actual event horizon.
The animation shows 10 supersized black holes that occupy center stage in their host galaxies, including the Milky Way and M87, scaled by the sizes of their shadows. Starting near the Sun, the camera steadily pulls back to compare ever-larger black holes to different structures in our solar system. up is 1601+3113, a dwarf galaxy hosting a black hole packed with the mass of 100,000 Suns. The matter is so compressed that even the black hole's shadow is smaller than our Sun.
The black hole at the heart of our own galaxy, called Sagittarius A* (pronounced ay-star), boasts the weight of 4.3 million Suns based on long-term tracking of stars in orbit around it. It's shadow diameter spans about half that of Mercury's orbit in our solar system.
The animation shows two monster black holes in the galaxy known as NGC 7727. Located about 1,600 light-years apart, one weighs 6 million solar masses and the other more than 150 million Suns. Astronomers say the pair will merge within the next 250 million years.
At the animation's larger scale lies M87' s black hole, now with a updated mass of 5.4 billion Suns. Its shadow is so big that even a beam of light - traveling at 670 million mph (1 billion kph) - would take about two and a half days to cross it.
The movie ends with TON 618, one of a handful of extremely distant and massive black holes for which astronomers have direct measurements. This behemoth contains more than 60 billion solar masses, and it boasts a shadow so large that a beam of light would take weeks to traverse it.
-
31:30
Degenerate Plays
1 day agoThe True American Sniper Is At Half-Mast - Call Of Duty Modern Warfare Remastered : Part 10
19K1 -
2:24:27
WeAreChange
5 hours agoTrump Has A Clear Path To Victory But It's A TRAP...
46.4K32 -
2:02:43
Kim Iversen
6 hours agoAzov Battalion Enacted a Silent Coup in Ukraine | Jack Posobiec: The Secret History Of Communist Revolutions
49.7K112 -
1:43:19
The Nima Yamini Show
5 hours agoMilo Yiannopoulos X Nima Yamini
37.7K22 -
2:11:25
Robert Gouveia
9 hours agoJack Smith in DANGER; Bragg's BIG Sentencing PROBLEM; Classified Docs DISMISSAL Fight
64.7K70 -
59:41
The StoneZONE with Roger Stone
12 hours agoKash Patel Joins Roger Stone To Talk About The Best Week In Donald Trump's Life | The StoneZONE
42.8K33 -
56:42
Edge of Wonder
10 hours agoIs Japan’s “Atlantis” Yonaguni Monument Man-Made? New Evidence Emerges
38.1K12 -
15:00
CarbonTV
19 days agoDECIVILIZED - CAMP LIFE
46K16 -
54:46
RealitySurvival
6 hours agoWW3 Has Begun! Global Prepper SITREP - Russia and China and Iran Oh MY!
29.2K7 -
2:08:32
Quite Frankly
12 hours ago"Declaration Day & Wide Open Lines" 7/2/24
38K20