NASA video helps to understand astounding scale of black holes

NASA has published a video in which they let us know how much black holes really occupy our universe. And it's downright astounding.

The universe is so large, and its distances and sizes so difficult to imagine, that it is difficult to understand its magnitude without seeing it on a relative scale or with clear and concise celestial bodies.

After surprising us with a simulation of what it would be like to be swallowed by a black hole, NASA wanted to round out the loop by making us a special in the form of a YouTube video in terms of size, illustrating what the supermassive black holes of our universe are like.

"Direct measurements, many made with the help of the Hubble Space Telescope, confirm the presence of more than 100 supermassive black holes," Jeremy Schnittman, a theorist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, explained in an official statement distributed to the media.

"How do they get so big? When galaxies collide, their central black holes can also merge at any given time," remarks the expert.

Starting in our Solar System, the clip reveals several of the most massive celestial objects discovered in our universe, such as the dwarf galaxy J1601+3113, in whose center we find a large black hole.

It is not the largest or closest, and this particular black hole is smaller than our Sun, but due to the compression to which matter is subjected, it contains a mass 100,000 times of it.

At the heart of our galaxy is the black hole known as Sagittarius A*, which weighs the equivalent of 4.3 million suns.

The diameter of this black hole's shadow is about half the width of Mercury's orbit.

We also find the heavy TON 618, a black hole that has more than 60,000 million times the mass of the Sun.

Yes, according to NASA calculations, we are talking about one of the few distant black holes that are really massive, and one of the few examples that we have been able to analyze in detail. And even listen to it in detail with a very interesting audio sample.

To date, we can say that TON 618 is the largest object ever detected in the entire known universe, with a shadow cast so large and extensive that it would take a beam of light several weeks to pass through it.

Black holes are the densest objects in our universe, huge bodies capable of generating gravitational fields so intense and powerful that not even photons of light manage to escape their event horizons, swallowing everything up.