The observable universe contains 40,000,000,000,000,000,000 stellar-mass black holes — that’s 40 quintillion, or 40 billion billions, a study has estimated.
Stellar-mass black holes are those that form at the end of the life of giant stars and have masses between a few and a few hundred times that of the sun.
Experts from the International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA) used a new computational approach to estimate how many of these holes should have formed.
Moreover, they said, these black holes account for 1 per cent of all the ordinary, or ‘baryonic’, matter in the observable universe, which is 93 billion light years across.
The findings, the team said, pave the way to a better understanding of how stellar- and intermediate-mass black holes might evolve into supermassive black holes.
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