Supermassive black hole

Supermassive Black Hole

A supermassive black hole is the biggest kind of black hole. It can be hundreds of thousands to billions of times the mass of the Sun. Black holes are special places in space where gravity is so strong that nothing, not even light, can escape.

Almost every big galaxy has a supermassive black hole in the middle. For example, our galaxy, the Milky Way, has a supermassive black hole at its center. This is linked to the radio source Sagittarius A*. When interstellar gas moves toward these black holes, it can create very bright objects called active galactic nuclei (AGNs) and quasars.

Two supermassive black holes have been pictured by the Event Horizon Telescope. These are Sagittarius A* in the center of the Milky Way, and the black hole in the center of Messier 87, a large elliptical galaxy. Studying these helps scientists learn about the universe and how galaxies grow.

Supermassive black holes are the largest type of black hole. They can be hundreds of thousands to billions of times the mass of the Sun. Unlike smaller black holes, supermassive black holes have weaker tidal forces near their event horizon. This means a person near the edge of such a black hole might feel forces similar to standing on Earth.

The search for supermassive black holes began in 1963 when Maarten Schmidt studied a bright radio source called 3C 273. At first, people thought it was a star, but they learned it was very far away and giving off huge amounts of energy. This made scientists think it might be a special kind of object called a quasar.

As scientists learned more, they began to think these powerful objects might be explained by supermassive black holes. In the 1970s, observations of stars moving quickly around the centers of galaxies showed there must be something very heavy there. Later, telescopes like the Hubble Space Telescope helped scientists find strong evidence for these black holes. In 2019, the Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration took the first picture of a black hole’s edge, confirming these giant objects really exist at the centers of many galaxies.