A polarized image of M87, the first black hole ever 'photographed'. (NASA/Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration)
What is a black hole like?
We know that nothing can escape their powerful gravity, not even light.
After that, understanding them gets kind of difficult. What is the environment like around a black hole? What is it like inside one?
Though we're getting closer to figuring them out—including how they are at the centre of every galaxy—even the experts are constantly left puzzled by them.
But a new video made by NASA is at least helping us understand one aspect of them.
Their immense size. Prepare to be amazed!
What's the matter?
Sgr A is the supermassive black hole at the centre of our own galaxy, the Milky Way. (Getty Embed)
Before we get to the video, let's talk about how black holes are built.
To create their strong gravity, black holes are extremely dense. (The more dense an object, the stronger its gravity.) This means that the matter (a.k.a. the stuff) inside them is squished together as tightly as possible. How tightly?
Let's take our own Sun. It is a bunch of plasma and gas that is about 1.39 million kilometres across, or 109 times the width of Earth. But if you were to take its matter and squish it into the density of a black hole, it would only measure about 3 km (1.8 miles) across. That is barely the width of a small village!
So as you look at these enormous black holes, keep that in mind! The amount of matter inside these things is almost impossible to comprehend.
Big, bigger, biggest
The video begins with our Sun. Next we see a dwarf black hole called J1601+3113. Though this first black hole is actually slightly smaller in width than the Sun, its mass (or the amount of matter inside it) is 100,000 times its mass!
As the video proceeds, the black holes get larger and larger. There are black holes that are bigger than our entire solar system!
Then we finally arrive at a monstrosity called TON 618. This supermassive black hole is one of the largest known, with a mass that is around 66 billion times that of our own Sun. Wow!
Blast off!
