![]() ![]() ‘Black holes at the centre of galaxies can be between a million and a few billion times the mass of our Sun,’ said Professor Phillip Best, astrophysicist at the University of Edinburgh.Īt the heart of every massive galaxy, we think there is a supermassive black hole. Supermassive black holes are gravitating monsters of the Universe. ![]() ‘We also think they play a really important role in how galaxies form, including the Milky Way.’ ‘At the heart of every massive galaxy, we think there is a supermassive black hole,’ said astrophysicist Dr Kenneth Duncan at the Royal Observatory in Edinburgh, UK. This is a supermassive black hole, or SMBH, and it has a mass that is millions of times that of our sun. The Nobel Prize in Physics 2020 was shared by scientists who discovered an invisible object at the heart of the Milky Way that pulls stars towards it. Events like this release bursts of energy that are detectable from billions of light years away. Not only do they trap light, black holes can shred any stars they encounter and even merge with each other. This compactness gives black holes immense gravitational pull. Imagine our Sun with its diameter of roughly 1.4 million kilometres shrinking to a black hole the size of a small city just six kilometres across. Once magnificent shining stars burn out and shrink to a relatively tiny husk, all their mass is concentrated in a small space. They are regions in space with such intense gravitation that not even light escapes their pull. ![]() Formed when a star burns all its nuclear fuel and collapses under its own gravitation, black holes are such oddities that at one time, even Einstein didn’t think they were possible. The weirdness exhibited by black holes boggles the mind. ![]()
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