Supermassive Black Holes: Darkness at the heart of our Galaxy

Figure 1. 'Sagittarius A' Supermassive black hole at the heart of Milky Way: Produced by 'Event Horizon' telescope

Source: Figure reproduced from NASA (2023).

Black holes - as the name suggests, appear to be dark circular voids in space. Though appearing empty, black holes consist of a “great amount of matter packed into a very small area” (Universe, n.d.) which creates a strong gravitational field that even light gets pulled into it (Universe, n.d.). These black holes are formed when a massive star collapses in on itself after it has exhausted all of its fuel (Dobrijevic and Tillman, 2023), or in other words - the death of a star results in the birth of a black hole.

The black hole discussed above is only a stellar black hole that is all over the universe and is very small compared to the size of a supermassive black hole (Dobrijevic and Tillman, 2023). These supermassive black holes do not form the way stellar black holes do and are found in the center of most galaxies, including our own Milky Way (Universe, n.d.). To understand a possible mechanism that could form a supermassive black hole - first, we must look at intermediate black holes - mid-sized. 

The small-sized black holes are stellar, the mid-sized are intermediate black holes, and lastly, the largest are supermassive black holes (Dobrijevic and Tillman, 2023). The intermediate black holes are formed because of the chain reaction of stars colliding in a bunch (Dobrijevic and Tillman, 2023). And if a lot of these intermediate black holes form in the same region, then they would all slip into the center of the galaxy and merge together to form a supermassive black hole (Universe, n.d.). 

References

Dobrijevic, D. & Tillman, N. (2023, May 19). Black holes: Everything you need to know. Space. https://www.space.com/15421-black-holes-facts-formation-discovery-sdcmp.html

Universe. (n.d.). Black holes. NASA Science. https://science.nasa.gov/astrophysics/focus-areas/black-holes

Black Holes. (2023, May 1). NASA animation aizes up the universe’s biggest black holes. NASA. https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2023/nasa-animation-sizes-up-the-universe-s-biggest-black-holes