https://youtube.com/watch?v=jU1DsipURcM
A new NASA animation highlights the “super” in supermassive black holes. These monsters lurk in the centers of most big galaxies, including our own Milky Way, and contain between 100,000 and tens of billions of times more mass than our sun.
“Direct measurements, many made with the help of the Hubble Space Telescope, confirm the presence of more than 100 supermassive black holes,” said Jeremy Schnittman, a theorist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “How do they get so big? When galaxies collide, their central black holes eventually may merge together too.”
In 2019 and 2022, a planet-spanning network of radio observatories called the Event Horizon Telescope produced, respectively, the first images of the giant black holes at the centers of M87 and the Milky Way. They revealed a bright ring of hot orbiting gas surrounding a circular zone of darkness.
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