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. Earth's gravity is strong enough to keep all of us stuck to the ground.
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.
At the opposite spectrum sits a behemoth called Ton 618. As one of only a handful of distant black holes we know of (it's located 10.37 billion light years from our planet), it has the mass of 60 billion Suns, and its shadow is so large it would take light weeks to cross it.
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.
Our Sun is just one of about 200 billion stars in our galaxy.
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.
English: Phoenix A, the new largest known black hole, compared to famous ultramassive black hole Ton 618 and the Orbit of Neptune for scale.
In the case of Ton 618, the enormous Lyman-alpha nebula surrounding it has the diameter of at least 100 kiloparsecs (320,000 light-years), twice the size of the Milky Way.
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.
The heaviest black hole known in the universe is the aptly named TON 618, estimated to be 66 billion times the mass of our sun. While only half that mass, the newly discovered ultramassive black hole in the centre of Abell 1201 is still a monster.
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.
There are no classes of object in our Universe more extreme than black holes. With so much mass present in such a tiny volume of space, they create a region around them where the curvature of space is so strong that nothing — not even light — can escape from its gravity once a certain boundary is crossed.
Logically, these giant black holes—each millions to billions of times heavier than our sun—must collide and merge, too. Such mergers can channel huge volumes of material into the black holes, sparking violent astrophysical outbursts that shape star formation and other processes in their host galaxies.
A new ultramassive black hole has been discovered, and we're not even going to try to get our heads around its scale. The enormous object observed for the first time is 30 billion times bigger than the Sun and is located hundreds of millions of light-years away.
Doha: A new video by NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center Conceptual Image Lab shed light on the gargantuan black hole TON 618, which carries the weight of over 60 billion solar masses. The video shows the TON 618 as bigger than our solar system itself and the gigantic Andromeda galaxy.
If you replaced the sun with Ton 618, its event horizon would reach out to 1300 AUs (1 AU = astronomical unit is the average distance from the Sun to the Earth), which is more than 30 times larger than our entire solar system if you define the outer boundary at the orbit of Pluto.
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.
Lurking some 3 billion light-years away, Alcyoneus is a giant radio galaxy reaching 5 megaparsecs into space. That's 16.3 million light-years long, and constitutes the largest known structure of galactic origin.
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.
At 1,600 light years away, the black hole is practically in our cosmic backyard. Gaia BH1 is the closest black hole to Earth that scientists have ever discovered.
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.
Any stars in the universe can collide, whether they are "alive", meaning fusion is still active in the star, or "dead", with fusion no longer taking place.
Orion is one of the most-recognizable constellations in the skies of the northern hemisphere. If one were to zoom in on the “nose” of the mighty hunter, one would eventually come upon a triple star system, called GW Orionis, around 1,300 light years from Earth.
Inside what's known as the black hole's event horizon, not even light itself can escape from a black hole. But that doesn't mean that black holes will live forever; on the contrary, they slowly decay away due to a phenomenon known as Hawking radiation.