COSMOS MAGAZINE
A black hole represents one of the universe’s most powerful phenomena. There are several types of black hole, including ‘stellar-mass’ and ‘supermassive.’
Stellar-mass black holes form when a dying star – more than eight times the mass of our sun – explodes as a supernova, then collapses in on itself to form a black hole.
Stellar-mass black holes can continue to grow and gain mass by eating stars or colliding with other black holes.
Supermassive black holes are much, much bigger – from hundreds of thousands to billions of times the sun’s mass.
Supermassive black holes origins are mysterious, but they are found at the centre of almost every galaxy. It’s known that they can grow by feeding on stars, or by merging with other supermassive black holes in galactic collisions.
An illustration of a magnetic field generated by a supermassive black hole. Credit: Roberto Molar Candanosa/Johns Hopkins University
But black holes aren’t just dark, hungry voids. They can emit significant amount of radiation from their accretion disks, the ring of matter caught in the black hole’s orbit and heated to extraordinary temperatures.
Credit: Farhad Yusef Zadeh/Northwestern University