Think of the most destructive thing you know. Is it a hammer? A car crusher? A three-year-old’s tantrum? Whatever it is, it doesn’t compare to the unapologetic destructive force of a black hole, which is widely considered to be the most destructive force in the entire universe. Its destructive nature comes from its extremely strong gravity, which is so strong that not even light can escape its grasp and will devour anything and everything in its path. This includes consuming entire stars and even spewing out their remains a few years later.
Black holes are created when a massive star approximately three times as massive as our Sun—or larger—dies and explodes in what’s known as a supernova. When this happens, the gravity responsible for the star’s collapse is so enormous that space itself becomes warped. As their name implies, we scientists cannot directly observe black holes, as their color blends in with the same color as space itself, so the only way we can observe the presence of a black hole is when it interferes with the matter around it. An excellent example of this is when a black hole is consuming a star and the star’s light is reflected by the black hole’s event horizon, or the boundary where matter is being drawn into the black hole.
Where are currently three types of black holes that we know of: primordial black holes that formed after the big bang, stellar black holes that are created from the collapse of large stars, and supermassive black holes which exist at the center of galaxies. It’s this last type that scientists have the least amount of knowledge, primarily because we’re still unsure how supermassive black holes are created in the first place.
Currently, the largest black hole ever discovered is TON 618, and is technically known as a hyperluminous, broad-absorption line, radio-loud quasar that is approximately 66 billion times the mass of our own Sun. It is both the largest and brightest black hole ever discovered to date.
What else will we learn about black holes in the coming years? Only time will tell, and this is why we science!
Sources: NASA, Labroots, NASA (1), Labroots (1), Cosmos, AZ Animals, Secrets of the Universe
As always, keep doing science & keep looking up!