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A supermassive black hole (SMBH or sometimes SBH) [a] is the largest type of black hole, with its mass being on the order of hundreds of thousands, or millions to billions, of times the mass of the Sun (M ☉).
A new NASA animation highlights the “super” in supermassive black holes. These monsters lurk in the centers of most big galaxies, including our own Milky Way, and contain between 100,000 and tens of billions of times more mass than our Sun.
For example, a supermassive black hole of a billion solar masses is believed to have existed in one galaxy more than 12 billion years ago — around 90% of the way back to the Big Bang.
Supermassive Black Holes are the monsters of the universe, living at the centers of nearly every galaxy. They range in mass from 100,000 to billions of times the mass of the Sun, far too massive to be born from a single star.
The Hubble Space Telescope and the Chandra X-ray Observatory looked in the heart of a pair of colliding galaxies and uncovered twin supermassive black holes waltzing around each other. The black hole duo, engorged with infalling gas, blazes brightly as active galactic nuclei (AGN).
Tour an alternative visualization that tracks a camera as it approaches, falls toward, briefly orbits, and escapes a supermassive black hole. This immersive 360-degree version allows viewers to look around during the flight.
Astronomers tracked the orbits of several stars near the center of the Milky Way to prove it houses a supermassive black hole, a discovery that won the 2020 Nobel Prize. When very massive objects accelerate through space, they create ripples in the fabric of space-time called gravitational waves.