Journey throughout our cosmos to experience some of the most powerful black holes known to science.
Just how big and destructive can black holes become, and what are they exactly? By investigating one of the most powerful forces in our universe, scientists hope to gather enough data to understand why and how they form. What could a supermassive black hole tell us about the extremes of time and space?
The gravity a supermassive hole possesses is enough to create a pull on billions of surrounding stars and even rip them apart. Usually at the very heart of galaxies, they drift to the beat of time and space, ejecting a gigantic jet of matter at its center and surrounded by accretion disk of super hot gasses.
This super hot gas usually spins as fast as the speed of light – or faster. Some supermassive black holes are even known to spin so fast they break the laws of physics. An example of this is Powehi (Messier 87), a black hole 54 million light-years from Earth which spins between 2.4 to 6.3 times faster than the speed of light.
The size some of these supermassive black holes are bigger than 7 billion Suns, a size so massive it’s hard wrapping your head around it. As a start, however, join the search through space as we locate and examine the most powerful black holes in the universe.