How quickly a black hole evaporates depends on its mass: the less massive a black hole, the more quickly it evaporates. But black holes evaporate through a process called Hawking Radiation. 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. There are a couple of candidate intermediate-mass black holes, such as HLX-1, which is estimated to be 20,000 solar masses.Īnother hypothetical class of black holes is primordial black holes, which would have formed out of density fluctuations in the early universe.
The black holes would be hundreds or thousands of solar masses. Artist's rendering of a supermassive black hole.īecause 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. Black holes grow by accreting surrounding matter and by merging with other black holes.
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This is the only black hole whose mass has been measured directly by observing the full orbit of a circling star. The supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way, Sagittarius A*, is 4.3 million solar 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. 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.ĭifferent types of black holes have very different masses. The first is an object’s mass (how much matter it contains) and the second is its volume (how much space it takes up). There are a couple of different ways to conceptualize how “big” something is. 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.
Everything that falls into a black hole is sucked toward the singularity. Such incredibly compact objects cause infinite curvature in the fabric of spacetime. Black holes are singularities: points of infinitely small volume with infinite density.
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