Claire Reid
NASA has shared a clip showing exactly how vast a black hole actually is - just in case you fancied an existential crisis at some point today.
Black holes are found at the centre of galaxies, such as the Milky Way where we all live, and differ in size. You can see NASA’s clip here:
According to the US space agency, the black holes featured in the clip range from 100,000 to more than 60 billion times our sun’s mass. So that’s something to think about - in fact, it might be all I think about for the rest of the day.
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The clip, which was created by the Goddard Space Flight Center Conceptual Image Lab, shows the scale of black holes in comparison to other celestial features - and if that’s not quite enough to spin you out, it’s also set to fairly haunting music.
Sharing the video, NASA explained: “All monster black holes are not equal. Watch this video to see how they compare to each other and to our solar system.
“The black holes shown, which range from 100,000 to more than 60 billion times our Sun’s mass, are scaled according to the sizes of their shadows – a circular zone about twice the size of their event horizons.
“Only one of these colossal objects resides in our own galaxy, and it lies 26,000 light-years away.
“Smaller black holes are shown in bluish colours because their gas is expected to be hotter than that orbiting larger ones. Scientists think all of these objects shine most intensely in ultraviolet light.”
Last month, researchers from Durham University in the UK said they were ‘extremely excited’ to have discovered an ‘ultramassive’ black hole hidden in the depths of the universe.
The scientists said that the recently-unearthed black hole is hundreds of millions of light-years away and weighs a staggering 30 billion times more than the mass of our sun.
According to a peer-reviewed study published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, the black hole in question is one of the biggest on record.
Lead study author, Dr James Nightingale of the Department of Physics at Durham University, said: “This particular black hole, which is roughly 30 billion times the mass of our sun, is one of the biggest ever detected [in space].
“[It is] on the upper limit of how large we believe black holes can theoretically become, so it is an extremely exciting discovery."