There are many black holes in our galaxy, and many more in our universe. Black holes can come in many shapes and sizes. The different variations that NASA is currently aware of stellar black holes and supermassive black holes. Both are indeed sizeable, but the supermassive black holes are the ones that are held responsible for the most damage to the universe.
When looking at what a black hole actually is, it’s a place in space where gravity is so dense that even light cannot escape it. How is NASA able to see and identify these black holes? Through amazing technology that has been developed. Using great telescopes such as the Hubble Telescope here in the United States, and using other tools available such as the ESA’s Herschel Space Observatory, it is possible to see the exact size of these holes and the damage they cause. The telescopes enable the space researchers to see the high energy light that is radiated around a black hole when it is devouring a star. This high energy light would otherwise be invisible, as it cannot be seen with the naked eye.
There are active and passive black holes in our universe. It is believed that for every galaxy, there is one supermassive black hole at its center. Sagittarius A is the supermassive black hole for our galaxy. The galaxy that has been identified as being affected by a supermassive black hole identified as IRASF11119+3257.
This is the first time that space scientists and astronomers have had the chance to observe a supermassive black hole in action.
It appears that the black hole has sucked in a good bit of stars, including whole constellations. The other aspect about these supermassive black holes is that they expel winds as they are sucking everything in, which then disperse stars and actually have the power to eliminate the energy needed to create new stars. This could prove to be threatening to a galaxy’s ability to regenerate after the black hole has subsided.
Supermassive black holes are nothing to play around with. They have the mass of about a million suns if not more. These massive giants have the ability to strip a galaxy clean. In this particular case, IRASF11119+3257’s galaxy is experiencing great losses in its amount of stars and the gases that it would take to regenerate those stars.
The good news in all of this, however, is that our supermassive black hole, Sagittarius A has been and will be passive for as long as NASA has been aware of it. This means that we here on Earth are safe from suffering any incidences with a black hole for a very long time.
