One black hole called GRS 1915+105, in the constellation Aquila (The Eagle) about 35,000 light-years from Earth, is spinning more than 950 times per second.
The rare "ultramassive" black hole sits at the centre of Abell 1201, a supergiant elliptical galaxy residing in a galaxy cluster of the same name, about 2.7 billion light-years from Earth.
on edge of Black Hole. Space and time are intertwined, called space-time, and gravity has the ability to stretch space-time. Objects with a large mass will be able to stretch space-time to the point where our perception of it changes, known as time dilation.
Ultramassive black holes are between tens of billions of solar masses. 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.
An isolated black hole (named MOQ-2011-BLG-191/OGLE-2011-BLG-0462), roaming through the Milky Way Galaxy all on its own.
One black hole called GRS 1915+105, in the constellation Aquila (The Eagle) about 35,000 light-years from Earth, is spinning more than 950 times per second.
White hole
Much less well known are white holes, which have the opposite properties. If nothing can get out of a black hole, the opposite is true for a white hole —nothing can get in— and it would require faster-than-light speed to penetrate the event horizon line, which is as close as we can get.
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.
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.
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.
In astrophysics, spaghettification is the tidal effect caused by strong gravitational fields. When falling towards a black hole, for example, an object is stretched in the direction of the black hole (and compressed perpendicular to it as it falls).
To a distant observer, clocks near a black hole would appear to tick more slowly than those farther away from the black hole. Due to this effect, known as gravitational time dilation, an object falling into a black hole appears to slow as it approaches the event horizon, taking an infinite time to reach it.
Near a black hole, the slowing of time is extreme. From the viewpoint of an observer outside the black hole, time stops. For example, an object falling into the hole would appear frozen in time at the edge of the hole.
These are way too massive to have been created by one star collapsing; it's still a mystery how they form. Black holes can eat other black holes, so it's possible that the supermassive ones are made of many small black holes merged together.
But, the interior of the black hole, or its 'singularity' (the point at which all the black hole's matter is concentrated) has already reached the limit of its density and cannot 'collapse' any further.
Oldest black hole ever
The supermassive black hole, discovered by JWST, has a mass 10 times that of our Sun, according to Space.com. What's astonishing is this is the oldest black hole that has ever been discovered in the universe, at the center of a galaxy just 570 million years after the universe began.
UMBHs sit in the center of galaxies like SMBHs, but they have more than five billion solar masses, an astonishingly large amount of mass. The largest black hole we know of is Phoenix A, a UMBH with up to 100 billion solar masses. How can something grow so massive?
Solitary black holes can generally only be detected by measuring their gravitational distortion of the light from more distant objects. Gaia BH1 was discovered on 13 June 2022 by Tineke Roegiers. Gaia BH1 is 1,560 light-years away from Earth in the direction of the constellation Ophiuchus.
Micro black holes are very small black holes. Because they are small, they may shrink and disappear due to Hawking radiation. They may exist in nature as primordial black holes.
A wormhole is like a tunnel between two distant points in our universe that cuts the travel time from one point to the other. Instead of traveling for many millions of years from one galaxy to another, under the right conditions one could theoretically use a wormhole to cut the travel time down to hours or minutes.
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.
Space can be a violent place. Asteroids and comets slam into planets, stars explode – or they are ripped apart by black holes. But in terms of scale, perhaps nothing is as violent as the collisions between huge clusters of galaxies.
These explosions generate beams of high-energy radiation, called gamma-ray bursts (GRBs), which are considered by astronomers to be the most powerful thing in the universe. What's more, these GRBs could be killing our chances of ever discovering life on other planets.
The collision of two supermassive black holes is the most violent event that can occur in the universe; experts explore where a black hole's energy originates and what really happens when the two most powerful objects in the cosmos clash.