A new animation shows how these cosmic monsters compare to other cosmic objects, and to each other.
, and the first black hole ever imaged by humanity, the black hole at the core of the galaxy Messier 87 . The sizes of the supermassive black holes in the animation are scaled up based on the width of their"shadows." , which is the point at which not even light can escape the black hole's tremendous gravitational pull. The diameter of the event horizon is determined by the mass of the black hole; more mass means a wider black hole.
The animation begins at our sun, which is the most massive object in the solar system, accounting for 99% of its mass. Our view then pulls back to gradually reveal increasingly wider structures in the solar system, such as the orbits of planets like Mercury, Earth andand the distance to features like the main asteroid belt and the Oort Cloud, a vast comet repository far from the sun. The animation compares these widths to supermassive black hole shadows of increasing size.
The first supermassive black hole featured is that of the dwarf galaxy J1601+3113, with a mass about 100,000 times that ofThe animation also highlights Sgr A*, which has a mass 4.3 million times that of the sun and a shadow with a diameter around half the distance between Mercury and the sun. Pulling out further, the animation passes the two massive black holes located in the galaxy NGC 7727.
About 1,600 light-years separates these two black holes, which have masses 6 million and 150 million times that of the sun, respectively. The distance between the two behemoths is declining all the time, however, and astronomers estimate that, within 250 million years or so, the two black holes will merge, forming an even more massive daughter black hole.
Collisions like this could be the key to understanding how supermassive black holes grow. Such mergers cause ripples in space-time called gravitational waves, which detectors here on Earth such as the
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