The smallest black holes may cram as much matter as three million Earths into a single tiny point. Some black holes, called supermassive black holes, may have as much matter as 1000 million Suns! The more matter something has, and the closer an object is to that matter, the stronger the gravity.
A team of astronomers recently found a black hole that is a staggering 12 billion times the mass of our sun. For comparison, our star is roughly 333,000 times the mass of Earth. This means that some 1.3 million Earths could fit inside one sun. Now multiply that number by 12 billion.
To put that in perspective, the volume of almost 5 billion suns could fit inside a sphere the size of UY Scuti. Our sun is enormous — more than a million Earths could fit inside of it. But on a stellar scale, it could be swallowed up by about half of all stars observed so far — especially stars like UY Scuti.
Peppered throughout the Universe, these "stellar mass" black holes are generally 10 to 24 times as massive as the Sun.
Yes, a black hole could potentially eat the Sun, which would have disastrous consequences for our planet (and the rest of the solar system).
This week, astronomers found a black hole 33 billion times heavier than our sun, approaching the upper limit of how large black holes can theoretically become. The cosmic giant sits at the centre of the supergiant elliptical galaxy Abell 1201, 2.7 billion light years from Earth.
Our Sun is just one of about 200 billion stars in our galaxy.
Astronomers Identify Real-Life Planet With Two Suns – Like “Tatooine” From Star Wars. Study proves ground-based telescopes can search for planets with two suns. Astronomers have used a new technique to confirm a real-life Tatooine, the fictional planet with two suns that was home to Luke Skywalker in “Star Wars.”
Planets have been found in multiple-star systems, but they often orbit only one of the stars. Planet KOI-5Ab, for example, also has three suns in its skies, but it orbits around only one of them, gravitationally bound to that one star as it interacts with its neighbouring stars.
Now, NASA recently witnessed black holes exhibiting bizarre behaviour. Yep, NASA's Hubble Space Telescope found black holes that were creating suns. Situated in the heart of dwarf galaxy Henize 2-10, the black hole is creating new stars like our Sun.
After just a few minutes more — 21 to 22 minutes total — the entire mass of the Earth would have collapsed into a black hole just 1.75 centimeters (0.69”) in diameter: the inevitable result of an Earth's mass worth of material collapsing into a black hole.
If the Sun was replaced with a black hole that had the same mass as the Sun, the Schwarzschild radius would be 3 km (compared to the Sun's radius of nearly 700,000 km).
When two stars merge slowly, they can create a new, brighter star called a blue straggler. If two stars traveling at a fast pace hit, they'll likely leave behind only hydrogen gas. Stars that collide with a black hole are ultimately consumed.
The planet is named Tatooine. In another classic case of science fiction turning into science fact, astronomers found a planet circling not two, but four stars. The most amazing aspect of this find? The planet was discovered by two "armchair" astronomers!
Using data from NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, scientists have identified an Earth-size world, called TOI 700 e, orbiting within the habitable zone of its star – the range of distances where liquid water could occur on a planet's surface.
The Sun is a star. There are lots of stars in the universe, but the Sun is the closest one to Earth, and it's the only one in our solar system. It is the center of our solar system.
Scientists have been able to segment galaxies into 4 main types: spiral, elliptical, peculiar, and irregular. Now, let's dive in!
One such estimate says that there are between 100 and 200 billion galaxies in the observable universe. Other astronomers have tried to estimate the number of 'missed' galaxies in previous studies and come up with a total number of 2 trillion galaxies in the universe.
Micro black holes, also called mini black holes or quantum mechanical black holes, are hypothetical tiny (<1 M ☉) black holes, for which quantum mechanical effects play an important role.
Our galaxy's supersized black hole, Sagittarius A*, as seen by the Event Horizon Telescope. It contains the equivalent mass of 4.3 million Suns and lies about 26,000 light-years away.
English: Phoenix A, the new largest known black hole, compared to famous ultramassive black hole Ton 618 and the Orbit of Neptune for scale.
Two neutron stars moving at 100 million meters per second rammed into one another in space. In what experts called a “cosmic car crash,” the stars merged and collapsed to form a black hole — while throwing out fragments that produced a perfectly spherical fireball of blue and red.
As the orbits of the two stars decay due to stellar mass loss and internal viscosity, the two stars will eventually merge, resulting in a luminous red nova.
The biggest single entity that scientists have identified in the universe is a supercluster of galaxies called the Hercules-Corona Borealis Great Wall. It's so wide that light takes about 10 billion years to move across the entire structure.