![definition obliteration definition obliteration](https://i0.wp.com/entokey.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/10-1055-b-006-160283_c011_f039.jpg)
Like all black holes, the huge ones are shielded from view by an event horizon. Its outer edge moves at half the speed of light. Whereas the outer planets in our solar system orbit once in 250 years, this much more massive object spins once every three months. The biggest black hole discovered so far weighs in at 40 billion times the mass of the Sun, or 20 times the size of the solar system. 11 fascinating facts about our Milky Way galaxy From Big Bang to present: Snapshots of our universe through time The 18 biggest unsolved mysteries in physics Quasars are the brightest objects in the universe. In this analogy, the black hole in its active state is like a light source 1 inch in diameter in downtown LA that outshines the city by a factor of hundreds or thousands. The roughly 100 million lights from cars, houses and streets in the city correspond to the stars in a galaxy. How bright is a quasar? Imagine hovering over a large city like Los Angeles at night. And if they are in their active quasar phase, you’ll be blasted by high-energy radiation.
![definition obliteration definition obliteration](https://content-chaussures.com/jysd/krjAaMqf1xMSDF9LD8SrkAHaFj.jpg)
If you get too close, the enormous gravity will suck you in. Massive black holes are dangerous in two ways. These black holes are dark most of the time, but when their gravity pulls in nearby stars and gas, they flare into intense activity and pump out a huge amount of radiation. It’s over a thousand times bigger than the black hole in our galaxy, whose discoverers snagged this year's Nobel Prize. Just last year, astronomers published the first-ever picture of a black hole (opens in new tab) and its event horizon, a 7-billion-solar-mass beast at the center of the M87 elliptical galaxy.
![definition obliteration definition obliteration](https://image1.slideserve.com/2322746/surgical-interventions6-l.jpg)
The fate of anyone falling into a black hole would be a painful "spaghettification," an idea popularized by Stephen Hawking in his book "A Brief History of Time." That’s like the difference between an apple and the Great Pyramid of Giza. Nature knows how to make black holes over a staggering range of masses, from star corpses a few times the mass of the Sun to monsters tens of billions of times more massive. Over the past 30 years, observations with the Hubble Space Telescope have shown that all galaxies have black holes at their centers.