Black hole 70 million times as massive as sun at center of M81 galaxy

When you think about how big our sun is, and then start to think about how massive some of the other objects are in the universe it is mind boggling. At the center of spiral galaxy M81 is a supermassive black hole about 70 million times more massive than our sun.

A study using data from Chandra and ground-based telescopes, combined with detailed theoretical models, shows that the supermassive black hole in M81 feeds just like stellar mass black holes, with masses of only about ten times that of the sun. This discovery supports Einstein’s relativity theory that states black holes of all sizes have similar properties.

Image Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/Wisconsin/D.Pooley & CfA/A.Zezas; Optical: NASA/ESA/CfA/A.Zezas; UV: NASA/JPL-Caltech/CfA/J.Huchra et al.; IR: NASA/JPL-Caltech/CfA