Size of Supermassive Black Hole?
Sizing up supermassive black holes
Located 26,000 light-years from the Sun, our galaxy’s central black hole, Sagittarius A*, has a radius about 17 times that of the Sun, meaning that it would sit well within Mercury’s orbit. And though it weighs in at about 4 million solar masses, the Milky Way’s black hole is small compared to some of the other supermassive black holes lurking at the center of other galaxies.
The most massive supermassive black hole discovered to date lies within the Abell 85 galaxy cluster. At the heart of this cluster is the galaxy Holm 15A, home to an estimated 2 trillion solar masses. The very center of this galaxy is almost as large as the Large Magellanic Cloud, which has a radius of 7,000 light-years.
700 million light-years from Earth, this cluster was twice the distance of any previous black hole measurement when the Ludwig-Maximilians-University’s USM Wendelstein Observatory and the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope began collecting data. They found that the black hole at the center of Holm 15A clocks in at colossal 40 billion solar masses, or roughly two-thirds the mass of all the stars in the Milky Way. At that mass, it has a diameter the size of the entire Solar System, an astounding size for any single object to have.
But the observable Universe is 46.5 billion light-years in any direction, meaning astronomers have only scratched the surface of black hole observations. It was only a year ago that the Event Horizon Telescope, consisting of eight telescopes located around the world, released the first image of a black hole. Furthermore, the LIGO-Virgo gravitational-wave collaboration is predicted to detect some 40 binary star mergers every year moving forward thanks to new upgrades, uncovering nearby black holes and neutron stars like never before. And with new telescopes, such as NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope and ESO’s Extremely Large Telescope, set to achieve first-light within the next decade, there is no way to tell how many massive monsters scientists will find lurking in the darkness of space in coming years.
Located 26,000 light-years from the Sun, our galaxy’s central black hole, Sagittarius A*, has a radius about 17 times that of the Sun, meaning that it would sit well within Mercury’s orbit. And though it weighs in at about 4 million solar masses, the Milky Way’s black hole is small compared to some of the other supermassive black holes lurking at the center of other galaxies.
The most massive supermassive black hole discovered to date lies within the Abell 85 galaxy cluster. At the heart of this cluster is the galaxy Holm 15A, home to an estimated 2 trillion solar masses. The very center of this galaxy is almost as large as the Large Magellanic Cloud, which has a radius of 7,000 light-years.
700 million light-years from Earth, this cluster was twice the distance of any previous black hole measurement when the Ludwig-Maximilians-University’s USM Wendelstein Observatory and the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope began collecting data. They found that the black hole at the center of Holm 15A clocks in at colossal 40 billion solar masses, or roughly two-thirds the mass of all the stars in the Milky Way. At that mass, it has a diameter the size of the entire Solar System, an astounding size for any single object to have.
But the observable Universe is 46.5 billion light-years in any direction, meaning astronomers have only scratched the surface of black hole observations. It was only a year ago that the Event Horizon Telescope, consisting of eight telescopes located around the world, released the first image of a black hole. Furthermore, the LIGO-Virgo gravitational-wave collaboration is predicted to detect some 40 binary star mergers every year moving forward thanks to new upgrades, uncovering nearby black holes and neutron stars like never before. And with new telescopes, such as NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope and ESO’s Extremely Large Telescope, set to achieve first-light within the next decade, there is no way to tell how many massive monsters scientists will find lurking in the darkness of space in coming years.
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