Black Holes: What Lies Beyond the Event Horizon, Part 1 of 2

Black holes form at the end of some stars’ lives. Black holes can form in many ways, though, and large black holes can have tens to millions of times the mass of our Sun trapped in a point smaller than the tip of a pin! It wasn’t until 2019 that scientists were able to construct an image of a black hole from data gathered by the Event Horizon Telescope. Even black holes smaller than our sun have a mass of a hundred thousand times our sun. The central black hole of the Circinus galaxy weighs more than one million suns. Here’s Earth. One of the largest known black holes, the massive TON 618, is a safe distance of 10 billion light years. It weighs 66 billion suns. Yet another recent discovery was an enormous flare of energy suddenly released by black hole J221951. This transient, or rapidly changing brightness, is one of the largest recorded. There’s an invisible giant monster on the loose! It’s barreling through intergalactic space, fast enough to travel from Earth to the Moon in 14 minutes. This potential supermassive black hole, weighing as much as 20 million suns, has left behind a never-before-seen 200,000 light-year-long trail of newborn stars. Runaway black holes have been the subject of theory for 50 years, and although this first is yet to be confirmed, it’s suspected there are many out there in the universe. Hubble, once again, showing us that the universe is full of fascinating phenomena!