Some black holes are anything but black - and we've found more than 75,000 of the brightest ones

[Judi Lynn]

By Sabine Bellstedt , Jessica Thorne published about 14 hours ago



Researchers have found over 75,000 of the brightest black holes. (Image credit: ESO/WFI (Optical); MPIfR/ESO/APEX/A.Weiss et al. (Submillimetre); NASA/CXC/CfA/R.Kraft et al. (X-ray), CC BY-SA)

This article was originally published at The Conversation.

When the most massive stars die, they collapse to form some of the densest objects known in the Universe: black holes. They are the "darkest" objects in the cosmos, as not even light can escape their incredibly strong gravity.

Because of this, it’s impossible to directly image black holes, making them mysterious and quite perplexing. But our new research has road-tested a way to spot some of the most voracious black holes of all, making it easier to find them buried deep in the hearts of distant galaxies.

Despite the name, not all black holes are black. While black holes come in many different sizes, the biggest ones are at the centres of galaxies, and are still growing in size.

These “supermassive” black holes can have the mass of up to a billion suns. The black hole at the centre of our own Milky Way galaxy – called Sagittarius A*, whose discovery received the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics – is fairly calm. But that isn’t the case for all supermassive black holes.

More:
https://www.space.com/black-holes-anything-but-black-75000-brightest-ones

[SCantiGOP]

1. Stephen Hawking even admitted

That we may be able to tell some of what happens in the vicinity of black holes, and we have theories about their structure and attributes, but we really don’t understand them.