NASA shares photos of supermassive black holes: ‘They could be made up of billions of stars’

NASA has released a video showing how large black holes can reach. The largest: about 43 times larger than the entire Milky Way. “Since 2019, more and more beautiful pictures of black holes have come out,” says space expert Rob van den Berg.

NASA is sharing the photos as part of their own Black Hole Week: an initiative of the space agency to draw attention to the space phenomenon. The largest black hole in their video is called TON 618 and has a diameter of at least 400 billion kilometers.

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The black hole is 10 billion light years away from Earth. According to NASA, TON 618 is one of the largest known objects in the entire universe. NASA Shows More Black Holes: Video compares several known black holes to the size of the Sun. The video shows that there is also a black hole in our universe.

The text continues below the video.

The first picture

“Until 2019, black holes were a purely theoretical phenomenon,” says van den Berg. “We were able to calculate their existence, but their existence has never been proven.”

“Since that first image in 2019, we’ve had more and more images of black holes at our disposal,” he continues. Since then we have seen increasingly clearer pictures. As a result, NASA created a very cool video, in which you can see how huge this video is supermassive black holes We are.’

Huge portions

According to van den Berg, it is becoming more and more known about black holes. We know that there are black holes at the centers of almost all solar systems. They arise because the stars in such a solar system attract each other. Stars collide, merge, and become very heavy. This forms a black hole.

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The larger this hole subsequently gets, van den Berg explains, the more stars it will attract later. Attractions are increasing, so black holes can take on gigantic sizes. Those extremely massive black holes were made up of hundreds of millions to several billion stars.

interest

Van den Berg sees a growing interest in black holes. Many people ask questions about black holes. There is a huge need for information, and NASA wants to respond to that with this Black Hole Week.