More monster black holes found in deep space

Just how big can a black hole get? About 10 billion times the mass of the sun big, according to a study published Monday in the journal Nature.

LOS ANGELES, CA (Catholic Online) - The study announces the discovery of two of the largest black holes yet observed by scientists. The behemoth objects are consuming everything around them as they pull in entire stars and their attendant planets. 

Black holes are formed when stars many times the mass of our sun die. Stars are fueled by hydrogen fusion, combining hydrogen atoms and converting them to helium in their cores. These conversions release nuclear energy which is the source of most radiation, including the familiar light and heat we experience from the sun. 

This process of billions of nuclear explosions occurring every second in the core of a star, is what keeps it shining and bloated as the force of the constant explosions counteracts the gravitational pull of the matter which makes the star.

However, every star eventually fuses all of its hydrogen into helium. It then begins converting helium into heavier and heavier elements until the atoms in its core combine into iron. Because iron atoms cannot be fused, the process stops just seconds after a star starts producing iron, causing the star to violently die by exploding its outer layers into space. The inner core, if massive enough, collapses inward on itself. 

A star such as our sun will collapse only so far, its mass is too small to form a black hole, but larger stars contain much more mass - so much that the process of collapse continues almost to infinity. An entire star, many times the size of our sun, can be collapsed to an object that is infinitesimally small. The object is known as a "singularity" and nobody knows for sure how large a singularity can be, but theories provide estimates which say they can be anywhere from the size of a pea to an atom-or even smaller. 

Despite their tiny physical size, they still retain the gravitational effect of their parent star, at the same distance. 

Singularities can distort the orbits of nearby objects including other stars passing through a galaxy. 

The gravity of black holes is so intense that nothing that passes close can escape. The point of no return around a black hole is known as the "event horizon" and nothing, not even light, can escape the pull of the black hole once it crosses the event horizon. Because of this, singularities are invisible to all direct observation-hence the term "black hole."

However, they can be observed by other means. Black holes disturb the orbits of passing stars, they bend light passing by them, and as they devour nearby objects, they accelerate the matter which is spiraling into their center. This accelerated matter is super-heated and gives off very intense radiation that can be observed. 

Scientists have found that supermassive black holes like the ones announced on Monday, occupy the centers of virtually every galaxy. Even our galaxy, the Milky Way, has a supermassive black hole at its center, but nothing near the size of the two announced on Monday.

The two recently discovered black holes were discovered by a team led by Nicholas McConnell and Chung-Pei Ma from the University of California, Berkeley. The two objects are devouring everything around them, but no need to worry. They are 320 and 335 million light years away respectively. 

The discovery of the two supermassive black holes raises new questions about the formation of galaxies and black holes themselves. It is believed that such black holes are critical to the formation of galaxies, but scientists still do not understand how that process works. The discoveries will form the basis for further research. 

---

'Help Give every Student and Teacher FREE resources for a world-class Moral Catholic Education'