This Is the Largest a Black Hole Could Ever Grow

The final numbers are astonishing

How fast does light travel? Heatedly, heart-thumpingly, forcefully fast. So fast time itself cannot keep up, the passage of seconds and minutes instead halting altogether at the speed of light. That speed is a number so big we dwell on whether or not we’ll ever be clever enough to match it. And yet no matter how much light exerts itself it will find its efforts are in vain. The darkness will always arrive first, waiting in silence for light to reach the places it’s already touched. This is true most of all in the shadowy corridors of space where, despite the beautiful bounty of plasma-bearing stars, they are a rarity in comparison to the plentiful darkness. Sometimes the darkness even consumes the light through violent and fascinating events. We call these regions “black holes”.

Black holes are nothing new. If current scientific theories are correct then they’ve been a part of the world since the universe was less than a billion years old. These primordial black holes would then have acquired more mass throughout the ages, feeding on planets and stars, sometimes even merging with other black holes to form one single larger body. But mergers are rare. Black holes aren’t common enough in the universe for mergers to happen very often. Together this process of feeding and merging…