What Is a Black Hole? How Big Can It Get?

The universe is filled with black holes, which remains one of the most fascinating and mysterious objects in the cosmos.

Black Holes Explained: What Exactly Are They?

Black holes are specific space places where density is extreme and gravitational attraction is too strong to the point where even light is unable to escape. Because no light escapes these black holes, they remain invisible to people.

Over 100 million black holes could be found within the Milky Way galaxy. However, it is extremely difficult to pick them up.

Situated at the core of the galaxy is the Sagittarius A supermassive black hole. It has the mass of around 4 million Suns and is situated around 26,000 light years away from the Earth.

There are two unique channels for the formation of black holes. The first one holds that these objects are actually stellar remains, which means that they come to be after huge stars die. Stars with birth masses that are equivalent to 8 to 10 Sun masses that exhaust their hydrogen ended up exploding and dying. Doing so results in a remnant object, a black hole that is dense and compact. This resultant black hole is called a stellar mass black hole. The mass of such black holes is equivalent to those of a few Suns.

Another way that black holes form is through direct gas collapse, which is a process that is thought to result from bigger black holes that have the mass of around 1,000 to 100,000 Suns.

How Big Can A Black Hole Get?

Black holes vary in sizes. Stellar black holes, which result from the death of a star, are relatively small and only have the mass of over three Suns. Nevertheless, they are extremely dense and deadly objects, with heightened gravitational forces sucking other objects around it. These masses keep growing in size as they consume gas and dust from the galaxies that surround them.

Giant black holes, known as supermassive black holes, are the ones that dominate the Universe. As such, these cosmic giants could have the mass that is equivalent to millions or billions of Suns. However, in terms of diameter, their sizes could remain the same. These supermassive black holes are believed to stay within every galaxy's core.

These supermassive black holes can grow even bigger as they suck the gas and dust around them.

Though scientists used to think that the sizes of black holes could only be boxed into extremes, studies have revealed that intermediate black holes (IMBHs), which are medium-sized ones, also exist. A 2018 study suggests that these IMBHs could lie at the core of every small or dwarf galaxy. Observations of 10 of these galaxies revealed X-ray activity, which is common among black holes, that suggests that black holes that are as massive as 36,000 to 316,000 Suns could be present.

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