The distant quasar--the most distant object in the universe known so far--is indicated by the arrow. Using a novel technique, astronomers have weighed the most distant black hole in the universe. It resides in a luminous galaxy, or quasar, so far away that its light took 13 billion years to reach Earth.
This energy takes the form of a slow-but-steady stream of radiation and particles that came to be known as Hawking radiation. With every bit of energy that escapes, the black hole loses mass and thereby shrinks, eventually popping out of existence altogether.
Astronomers believe that supermassive black holes lie at the center of virtually all large galaxies, even our own Milky Way. Astronomers can detect them by watching for their effects on nearby stars and gas. This chart shows the relative masses of super-dense cosmic objects.
Anything outside this surface —including astronauts, rockets, or light—can escape from the black hole. But once this surface is crossed, nothing can escape, regardless of its speed, because of the strong gravitational pull toward the center of the black hole.
Astronomers Have Discovered a Black Hole Jet That Is 50 Times Larger Than Its Galaxy.
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.
Most of these are invisible to us, and only about a dozen have been identified. The nearest one is some 1,600 lightyears from Earth. In the region of the Universe visible from Earth, there are perhaps 100 billion galaxies.
If black holes evaporate under Hawking radiation, a solar mass black hole will evaporate over 1064 years which is vastly longer than the age of the universe. A supermassive black hole with a mass of 1011 (100 billion) M ☉ will evaporate in around 2×10100 years.
Earth is facing no threat because no black hole is close enough to the solar system for our planet. According to NASA, even if a black hole the same mass as the sun replace the sun, Earth still would not fall in.
A black hole is a place where space is falling faster than light.
It is incredibly unlikely that Earth would ever fall into a black hole. This is because, at a distance, their gravitational pull is no more compelling than a star of the same mass.
It is absolutely not possible to go into a black hole and come out again. In a way this is the real definition of a black hole. Not even light can escape, and light moves very very fast!
To make a black hole, one must concentrate mass or energy sufficiently that the escape velocity from the region in which it is concentrated exceeds the speed of light. Some extensions of present physics posit the existence of extra dimensions of space.
The inequality suggests that to destroy a black hole, all you need to do is to feed it angular momentum and charge. But that hides a multitude of problems. For a start, things with angular momentum and charge also tend to have mass. And in any case, the equation above describes a steady state.
It is possible for two black holes to collide. Once they come so close that they cannot escape each other's gravity, they will merge to become one bigger black hole.
Wormholes are shortcuts in spacetime, popular with science fiction authors and movie directors. They've never been seen, but according to Einstein's general theory of relativity, they might exist.
Is it possible for a black hole to "eat" an entire galaxy? No. There is no way a black hole would eat an entire galaxy. The gravitational reach of supermassive black holes contained in the middle of galaxies is large, but not nearly large enough for eating the whole galaxy.
Super-distant black hole is eating half a sun a year and blasting its leftovers at Earth. Astronomers have made the most distant observation of a black hole ripping apart a star and feasting upon it, thanks to a jet of stellar "leftovers" blasted directly toward Earth.
Once inside the black hole's event horizon, matter will be torn apart into its smallest subatomic components and eventually be squeezed into the singularity. As the singularity accumulates more and more matter, the size of the black hole's event horizon increases proportionally.
Stellar black holes are very cold: they have a temperature of nearly absolute zero – which is zero Kelvin, or −273.15 degrees Celsius.
Eventually, the entire contents of the universe will be crushed together into an impossibly tiny space – a singularity, like a reverse Big Bang. Different scientists give different estimates of when this contraction phase might begin. It could be billions of years away yet.
NASA has released a haunting audio clip of sound waves rippling out of a supermassive black hole, located 250 million light-years away. The black hole is at the center of the Perseus cluster of galaxies, and the acoustic waves coming from it have been transposed up 57 and 58 octaves so they're audible to human hearing.
Astronomers estimate that 100 million black holes roam among the stars in our Milky Way galaxy, but they have never conclusively identified an isolated black hole.
Sombrero Galaxy
Also known as Messier 104 (M104), the Sombrero is located about 28 million light-years from Earth and measures 50,000 light-years across.
To get to the 40 quintillion sum (that's 40 billion billions, or 40,000,000,000,000,000,000) the research team coupled a new star evolution code called SEVN and with data on the metallicity, star formation rates, and stellar sizes in known galaxies.