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From Super to Ultra: Just How Big Can Black Holes Get?

Page Last Updated: March 24th, 2014
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A large elliptical galaxy at the center of the galaxy cluster PKS 0745-19. (X-ray: NASA/CXC/Stanford/Hlavacek-Larrondo, J. et al; Optical: NASA/STScI)
View large image Some of the biggest black holes in the Universe may actually be even bigger than previously thought, according to a study using data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory.

Astronomers have long known about the class of the largest black holes, which they call "supermassive" black holes. Typically, these black holes, located at the centers of galaxies, have masses ranging between a few million and a few billion times that of our sun.

This analysis has looked at the brightest galaxies in a sample of 18 galaxy clusters, to target the largest black holes. The work suggests that at least ten of the galaxies contain an ultramassive black hole, weighing between 10 and 40 billion times the mass of the sun. Astronomers refer to black holes of this size as "ultramassive" black holes and only know of a few confirmed examples.

"Our results show that there may be many more ultramassive black holes in the universe than previously thought," said study leader Julie Hlavacek-Larrondo of Stanford University and formerly of Cambridge University in the UK.

The researchers estimated the masses of the black holes in the sample by using an established relationship between masses of black holes, and the amount of X-rays and radio waves they generate. This relationship, called the fundamental plane of black hole activity, fits the data on black holes with masses ranging from 10 solar masses to a billion solar masses.

The black hole masses derived by Hlavacek-Larrondo and her colleagues were about ten times larger than those derived from standard relationships between black hole mass and the properties of their host galaxy. One of these relationships involves a correlation between the black hole mass and the infrared luminosity of the central region, or bulge, of the galaxy.

"These results may mean we don't really understand how the very biggest black holes coexist with their host galaxies," said co-author Andrew Fabian of Cambridge University. "It looks like the behavior of these huge black holes has to differ from that of their less massive cousins in an important way."

All of the potential ultramassive black holes found in this study lie in galaxies at the centers of massive galaxy clusters containing huge amounts of hot gas. Outbursts powered by the central black holes are needed to prevent this hot gas from cooling and forming enormous numbers of stars. To power the outbursts, the black holes must swallow large amounts of mass, in the form of hot gas. Because the largest black holes can swallow the most mass and power the biggest outbursts, ultramassive black holes had already been predicted to exist, to explain some of the most powerful outbursts seen. The extreme environment experienced by these galaxies may explain why the standard relations for estimating black hole masses do not apply.

These results can only be confirmed by making detailed mass estimates of the black holes in this sample, by observing and modeling the motion of stars or gas in the vicinity of the black holes. Such a study has been carried out for the black hole in the center of the galaxy M87, the central galaxy in the Virgo Cluster, the nearest galaxy cluster to earth. The mass of M87's black hole, as estimated from the motion of the stars, is significantly higher than the estimate using infrared data, approximately matching the correction in black hole mass estimated by the authors of this Chandra study.

"Our next step is to measure the mass of these monster black holes in a similar way to M87, and confirm they are ultramassive. I wouldn't be surprised if we end up finding the biggest black holes in the Universe," said Hlavacek-Larrondo. "If our results are confirmed, they will have important ramifications for understanding the formation and evolution of black holes across cosmic time."

In addition to the X-rays from Chandra, the new study also uses radio data from the NSF's Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (JVLA) and the Australia Telescope Compact Array (ATCA) and infrared data from the 2 Micron All-Sky Survey (2MASS).

These results were published in the July 2012 issue of The Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., manages the Chandra program for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory controls Chandra's science and flight operations from Cambridge, Mass.

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By: Maria Temming
July 22, 2014
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Black holes are singularities: points of infinitely small volume with infinite density. Such incredibly compact objects cause infinite curvature in the fabric of spacetime. Everything that falls into a black hole is sucked toward the singularity. At some distance away from the singularity, the escape velocity exceeds the speed of light, sometimes dramatically dubbed “the point of no return,” although the technical term is Schwarzschild radius or event horizon . But what are the sizes of black holes?
There are a couple of different ways to conceptualize how “big” something is. The first is an object’s mass (how much matter it contains) and the second is its volume (how much space it takes up). However, the radius of a black hole’s event horizon is directly dependent on its mass, so in this case we can answer the question, "How big is a black hole?" solely with respect to mass.
Different types of black holes have very different masses. Stellar-mass black holes are typically in the range of 10 to 100 solar masses, while the supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies can be millions or billions of solar masses. The supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way, Sagittarius A*, is 4.3 million solar masses. This is the only black hole whose mass has been measured directly by observing the full orbit of a circling star. Black holes grow by accreting surrounding matter and by merging with other black holes.
Because there is such a huge leap in sizes of black holes, between stellar-mass and supermassive black holes, it has been hypothesized that a class of intermediate-mass black holes also exists. The black holes would be hundreds or thousands of solar masses. There are a couple of candidate intermediate-mass black holes, such as HLX-1, which is estimated to be 20,000 solar masses.
Another hypothetical class of black holes is primordial black holes, which would have formed out of density fluctuations in the early universe. Generally, they would have been so tiny (the minimum mass would be the Planck mass ) that they can only be properly described using quantum mechanics. But black holes evaporate through a process called Hawking Radiation. How quickly a black hole evaporates depends on its mass: the less massive a black hole, the more quickly it evaporates. For a primordial black hole to have survived to the present day, it would have to contain a few billion tons of mass, with a radius comparable to that of an atomic nucleus.
Want to know more about sizes of black holes? Enter your email and download our FREE Black Holes ebook ! As a bonus, you'll also receive our weekly e-newsletter with the latest astronomy news.

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