Ever Wondered Just How Large Can Black Holes Get?
Take a look at the staggering size of the largest objects in the known universe.
Black holes are essentially the end of the universe. They are the end of space and time as we know it.
NASA describes them more plainly, noting that they are a place where an incomprehensible amount of matter meets, and where gravity pulls so much that even light cannot get out. Because no light can get out, black holes (obviously) cannot be seen. In order to see and study them, scientists need special space telescopes with distinct tools, such as radar technologies, to spot them via their emissions.
Since black holes are formed by large amounts of matter, all black holes are big, but they do range in size. In fact, black holes are categorized into four groups: miniature/small black holes (but note that "small"is relative. They are still super huge.), intermediate black holes, stellar black holes, and supermassive black holes.
But just how big are the largest these supermassive black holes? How huge does a black hole have to be to garner such a title?
The video here puts different black holes into perspective. And indeed, when these types of black holes are compared to other massive celestial objects, we get an idea of their exact size, and it is mind-boggling.
Supermassive black hole 'burps' reveal how big the cosmic monsters grow
Black hole feeding patterns may tell us more than how hungry they are.
Steph Panecasio
Aug. 15, 2021
The way a supermassive black hole flickers may determine its size.
When you think about black holes, you probably don't tend to wonder if they're hungry. The idea of a hungrily feeding black hole is quite intimidating, I bet. Rest easy, however, because a black hole's eating pattern may help us better understand them.
A new study from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign published Thursday in the journal Science has revealed feeding supermassive black holes emit a noticeable flickering light, the pattern of which is directly related to their mass.
When dormant, supermassive black holes are typically quite dull and don't emit much light. When active and feeding, however, they produce a pattern of flickering light we can detect from across the universe, ranging from hours to decades.
"There have been many studies that explored possible relations of the observed flickering and the mass of the SMBH, but the results have been inconclusive and sometimes controversial," said Colin Burke, an astronomy graduate student and lead author of the study.
The team, led by Burke, analyzed the variability patterns to identify a characteristic timescale, allowing them to equate the flickering patterns with the mass of a supermassive black hole. When it comes to these active, feeding supermassive black holes, shorter timescales of flickering indicate a smaller black hole, while longer timescales indicate more massive black holes.
The researchers describe the flickering as the black hole equivalent of a burp. When we're infants, we typically burp a lot more. Adults however, are able to hold in the burp for longer (unless you're of the "better out than in" persuasion).
It's the burps that could help us come to terms with the relative sizes of not only supermassive black holes but also accreting white dwarfs and -- hopefully -- intermediate-mass black holes, or IMBHs, which are thought to have formed throughout the history of the universe but are rare and hard to find.
"Now that there is a correlation between the flickering pattern and the mass of the central accreting object, we can use it to predict what the flickering signal from an IMBH might look like," Burke said.
First published on Aug. 12, 2021 at 11:00 a.m. PT.
Size of Supermassive Black Hole Divulged by Eating Pattern
August, 14, 2021 -
Science news
TEHRAN (Tasnim) – Astronomers have finally linked the size of a supermassive black hole to the spectral patterns generated by its eating habits.
Most nearby supermassive black holes are dormant. These long-sated, sleeping giants ate up their supply of gas and dust many millions of years ago, leaving them dark and quiet.
To identify dormant black holes, scientists must measure their gravitational influences on nearby stars and gas clouds.
In the distant cosmos, however, scientists can observe supermassive black holes as they were during the early universe, when these rapidly growing galactic centers were accreting prodigious amounts of stellar material and outshining whole galaxies.
According to a new study, published Thursday in the journal Science, the size of a supermassive black hole is revealed by the object's eating pattern.
When a supermassive black hole pulls material into its accretion disk, the captured gas and dust gets condensed and forms what's called a corona, which yields extremely bright X-ray light.
The light emitted by the accretion disk and its corona is not constant, but flickers.
Flickers of electromagnetic radiation can form patterns across time-scales as short as a few hours or as long as several decades.
"There have been many studies that explored possible relations of the observed flickering and the mass of the SMBH, but the results have been inconclusive and sometimes controversial," lead study author Colin Burke, an astronomy graduate student at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, said in a press release.
For the new study, researchers compiled a large record of variable flickering patterns produce by actively feeding SMBHs. Though flickering patterns produced by a black hole's consumption are random, researchers can quantify the power of a black hole's variability as a function of timescales.
For white dwarfs, collapsed sun-like stars, researchers confirmed a black hole's mass was tightly correlated with the variability timescale.
The relation was easier to observe among white dwarfs, which are millions to billions times less massive than SMBHs.
For supermassive black holes, the stretched out timescales make variability patterns harder to decipher, but researchers confirmed that the same relationship between mass and variability timescales is present among the even the largest black holes.
"These results suggest that the processes driving the flickering during accretion are universal, whether the central object is a supermassive black hole or a much more lightweight white dwarf," said co-author Yue Shen, professor of astronomy at the University of Illinois.
Astronomers hope their work will lead to the discovery of intermediate black holes, IMBHs -- those with a mass between 100 and 100,000 times the mass of the sun.
Scientists have found and studied thousands of stellar-mass black holes and supermassive black holes, but only one confirmed IMBH has been discovered.
"Now that there is a correlation between the flickering pattern and the mass of the central accreting object, we can use it to predict what the flickering signal from an IMBH might look like," Burke said.
Beginning in 2023, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile will carry out the largest-ever survey of flickering light across the cosmos -- The Legacy Survey of Space and Time survey will measure the flickering patterns of billions of objects.
"Mining the LSST data set to search for flickering patterns that are consistent with accreting IMBHs has the potential to discover and fully understand this long-sought mysterious population of black holes," co-author Xin Liu, an astronomy professor at Illinois.
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