Supermassive Black Holes

Black holes are nothing new, but do you know anything about supermassive black holes? The distinction is between a garden snail and one of those bizarre, cat-sized snails that some people occasionally keep as pets. Something about something that is larger than it should be can make you feel quite uneasy.

If there is such a thing as a "typical" black hole, it might range in size from 10 to 100 solar masses. It is therefore 10 to 100 times more dense than a star. You must agree that something 100 times the size of our sun would essentially devour our entire solar system. That dark hole is a typical one.

You can also expect to see a sizable black hole in the galaxy's center in every given case. The central black hole of our Milky Way galaxy weighs roughly 4.5 million solar masses. Although it's large, is it supermassive? Still not. The unassuming term TON 618 refers to the largest black hole that has been found so far. 66 billion solar masses have been calculated as its mass.

In comparison to the black hole in the center of our galaxy, it is more than 15,000 times more massive. To provide some further context, it has been calculated that the solar mass of all the stars in the Milky Way may reach 64 billion sun masses, which would easily wipe out not only our solar system but the entire galaxy.