NASA showed the size of the largest black holes in scale

A new video has been released on the NASA Goddard YouTube channel that clearly shows the colossal size of black holes.

When we think of black holes, the word that most often comes to mind is “supermassive”—that is, we think of mass, not size. And this is not surprising, because their mass starts from 100 thousand masses of our Sun and can reach tens of billions of solar masses.

At the same time, black holes are the densest objects in the observable universe. They are so compact that mathematically we can only describe them as a singularity - that is, a one-dimensional point of infinite density. And because of this high density, time and space are curved into a sphere. Even light cannot get out of this sphere: it lacks speed.

To determine the size of a black hole, look exactly at the edge of this sphere - it is called the event horizon. The more massive the black hole, the larger the sphere around it. The radius of this sphere is called the Schwarzschild radius.

The video begins with a black hole in the dwarf galaxy J1601+3113. Its mass is about 100,000 solar masses, while the Schwarzschild radius is less than half the size of the Sun.

Then the scale starts to increase. We are shown Sagittarius A * - a black hole in the center of our galaxy with a mass of 4.3 million solar masses. Another famous black hole is M87*, the first to be photographed. It is noticeably heavier: its mass is the same as that of 5.37 billion Suns.

The demo ends with TON-618, one of the largest black holes in the observable universe. Its mass is comparable to 66 billion solar, and the Schwarzschild radius exceeds 1,300 astronomical units. Fortunately, TON-618 is far from us. At 10.8 billion light-years, to be more precise: you can exhale calmly.