A Baby That Could Kill Me

A black hole is a region in space where gravity draws so much that it is difficult for even light to come out. Since matter is compressed into a small room, gravity is tremendous, which occurs when a star nears death. Since no light can get out, black holes can not be seen by people.They’re invisible, that is. Space telescopes can help locate black holes using special instruments. These special tools will see how stars behave differently from other stars that are very close to black holes. Then, there’s baby black holes.

Baby black holes are the same as normal black holes, but are smaller in size. In distant galaxies, radio images of the sky have shown hundreds of “baby” and supermassive black holes alike, with the light of the galaxies bouncing about in surprising ways. Galaxies are vast cosmic bodies, tens of thousands of light-years in size, made up of gas, dust, and stars.

People would expect the amount of light emitted from galaxies to change slowly and steadily over time, far beyond the lifetime of a person, given their size.

According to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), black holes can be big or small. Scientists think the smallest black holes are as small as just one atom. These black holes are very tiny but have the mass of a large mountain. Mass is the amount of matter, or “stuff,” in an object. Another kind of black hole is called “stellar.” Its mass can be up to 20 times more than the mass of the sun. There may be many, many massive stellar black holes in Earth’s galaxy, Milky Way.

The biggest black holes are called “supermassive.” These black holes have masses that collectively make up more than 1 million Suns. Scientists also found evidence that, at its core, a giant galaxy contains a supermassive black hole. Sagittarius A is considered the supermassive black hole at the heart of the Milky Way galaxy. It has a mass equal to around 4 million Suns, and could contain a few million Earths inside. Scientists think that when the universe started, the smallest black holes formed.

Scientists still don’t know how large is the biggest black hole in the universe. It could be as large as a planet or as small as an atom. These “baby” black holes could be so strong that it could wipe out a whole planet.

Article by Matthew Lawrence Tomarong, Scintillate

Edited by John Derek Ganub, JUST SciTech Editor