NASA has just released an animation video highlighting the largest black holes in the universe. These ten supermassive black holes immerse their host galaxies, including the Milky Way and M87, scaled by the sizes of their shadows. The camera starts near the Sun and then steadily pulls back to compare the black holes to various structures in our solar system.
The first one we see is 1601+3113, which packs the mass of 100,000 Suns in a dwarf galaxy. Its matter is so compressed that even the black hole’s shadow is smaller than our Sun. Speaking of our galaxy, Sagittarius A* lies in the Milky Way’s center, and boasts the mass of 4.3 million Suns based on long-term tracking of stars in orbit around it. We also see two gargantuan black holes in NGC 7727, located approximately 1,600 light-years apart, with one weighing 6 million solar masses and the other more than 150 million Suns.
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Since 2015, gravitational wave observatories on Earth have detected the mergers of black holes with a few dozen solar masses thanks to the tiny ripples in space-time these events produce. Mergers of supermassive black holes will produce waves of much lower frequencies which can be detected using a space-based observatory millions of times larger than its Earth-based counterparts,” said Ira Thorpe, NASA Goddard Astrophysicist.
