How do Black Holes Become ‘Super-Massive’? An Easy Guide
NASA recently spotted a super-massive black hole, 250 million light-years from earth, eating a lonely star.
Black holes are some of the densest, most massive and most fascinating objects in the universe, and can grow to be unimaginably large — like 40 billion times the mass of the sun large — through a variety of processes.
There are three known types of black holes, all distinguished by size:
- Stellar-mass black holes
- Intermediate-mass black holes, and
- Supermassive black holes.
Stellar-mass black holes — the smallest of three — are typically formed when a massive star collapses at the end of its lifecycle. These black holes can be several times larger than the mass of the sun and can be up to a few tens of kilometres in diameter.
Intermediate-mass black holes, which have masses between 100 and 100,000 solar masses, are thought to exist — theoretically — but have been difficult to detect. But supermassive black holes are where things start to get exciting. They are the largest type of black hole and can have masses that are millions or billions of times larger than the sun.
