As the name suggests, supermassive black holes contain between a million and a billion times more mass than a typical stellar black hole. Although there are only a handful of confirmed supermassive black holes (most are too far away to be observed), they are thought to exist at the centre of most large galaxies, including the centre of our own galaxy, the Milky Way.
The NACO observations of the Milky Way centre
Direct evidence for a supermassive black hole – a plot of the orbital motion of the star S2 around the centre of the Milky Way. From these observations, astronomers have inferred that a supermassive black hole of about 3 million solar masses lurks at the centre of our galaxy.
Credit: ESO
For many years, astronomers had only indirect evidence for supermassive black holes, the most compelling of which was the existence of quasars in remote active galaxies. Observations of the energy output and variability timescales of quasars revealed that they radiate over a trillion times as much energy as our Sun from a region about the size of the Solar System. The only mechanism capable of producing such enormous amounts of energy is the conversion of gravitational energy into light by a massive black hole.
More recently, direct evidence for the existence of supermassive black holes has come from observations of material orbiting the centres of galaxies. The high orbital velocities of these stars and gas are easily explained if they are being accelerated by a massive object with a strong gravitational field that is contained within a small region of space – i.e. a supermassive black hole.
Astronomers are still not sure how these supermassive black holes form. Stellar black holes result from the collapse of massive stars, and some have suggested that supermassive black holes form out of the collapse of massive clouds of gas during the early stages of the formation of the galaxy. Another idea is that a stellar black hole consumes enormous amounts of material over millions of years, growing to supermassive black hole proportions. Yet another, is that a cluster of stellar black holes form and eventually merge into a supermassive black hole.
THE END OF TIMES: Supermassive Black Hole
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