The LARGEST Black Hole in the Universe- The size comparison I needed (Kurzgesagt Reaction)

[@fabriziobiancucci7702]

Fun fact: this video is a little outdated... because today we know that TON isn't the biggest of all: now the record belongs to Phoenix A, a black hole with 100 billion solar masses (about 16 solar system in diameter). By the way, since they mentioned the quasi-star, I suggest you the Kurzsegart video about them (Black Hole Stars)

[@NoProtocol]

And I thought TON was a menace. I’m keen to check out more videos on the subject so thank you for the suggestion!

[@fabriziobiancucci7702]

@@NoProtocol The good news is that all these black holes are so far away that even if they travel at the speed of light they would never reach us due to the expansion of the universe

[@AS-fo3ew]

@@fabriziobiancucci7702 But, still TON 618 is considered the biggest by size. In this video, TON 618's accretion disk is not being counted for size. Phoenix A is still smaller than TON618 by almost 2.5 times if your figure of 16 solar systems in diameters is correct and includes size of accretion disk also ?

[@VolMacros]

@@AS-fo3ew i believe only the size of the event horizon is considered when calculating how big a black hole is

[@fabriziobiancucci7702]

@@AS-fo3ew This video didn't considered accrescion disk an neither did I. And until now I didn't see any scientist considered it since it's not part of the black hole

[@kiraoshiro6157]

I love the increasingly epic music kurzgesagt uses in their celestial body size comparison videos

[@HenryHeimlich]

If you want a lot of good information about Black Holes I would recommend the youtuber Dr. Becky, an Oxford Astrophysicist and youtuber who studies them. She is good at relaying information in a more simplified way for non-astrophysicists to understand. Otherwise I recommend SpaceTime if you want more brain-exploding information about these things.

[@ravenward626]

👍PBS Spacetime is awesome.

[@SaltyFrosticles]

Dr Becky and her enthusiasm/delivery is what sets her apart. It's infectious and helps make complex topics more approachable.

[@zoeherriot]

She rocks. Definitely recommend Dr Becky.

[@bakersmileyface]

Those channels are my go-to for physics information accessible to the public. As a literary recommendation, I really liked Dr. Becky's black hole book and I also really liked "black hole wars" by Leonard Susskind which delves into prominent theories. Oh and the channel "history of the universe" is pretty good at getting people up to date with where we are in physics

[@p57-elf]

I would not recommend Dr Becky it's like kids science.. PBS space time is much better and Matt is really good unless you're brain challenged then go for the kids stuff!!

[@dragonfly.effect]

Just another recommendation for @DrBecky, who is both a black hole expert & a lot of good humour & fun here on YT. Her most recent book (for general audiences) is 《A Brief History of Black Holes》, and well worth the read if you want to go a bit farther/deeper than this video. Matt O'Dowd @pbsSpacetime is a PhD physics educator who can also tell a lot about a lot of things, including BH's. If you want even more details, astrophysicist @AntonPetrov tends to cover recent developments in science, particularly in his own field. He's pretty consistent about starting with more basic material, & providing links to both basics & the new papers he discusses. Finally, @Veritasium has put out at least one or two videos explaining how to understand the "photographic" images published last year of the BH in M87 & Sag A* in the center of the Milky Way.

[@MaddMann08]

i started watching Dr. Becky a couple of months ago i love her videoa and her bloopers lol

[@Outland9000]

Wait... Dr B has a book? Well, I know what I'm getting myself for Christmas.

[@ggrievouss]

She has 2 in fact! "Space: 10 Things you should know" is the first one, and both of them are well worth the read. Highly recommend!

[@kimmogensen4888]

In the center of our galaxy there is a super massive black hole, when Andromeda galaxy which is much larger than our galaxy and has a much larger black hole in its center will catch up to us the black holes will become one and most of the to galaxies will become one even bigger galaxy but life on Earth will not be possible because of the sun has burned out planet, to witness it from earth, but hopefully we have moved to another planets, it will probably not be deadly to life on a earth like planet with a younger star than our sun. The distance are to great for collisions to be realistic dangers and the center of the galaxy is far from our neighborhood.

[@ANunes06]

9:20 - The mass is determined by observing the effects on nearby stars (which can accurately mass using other techniques). Since the mass is directly proportional to the size, it's a simple jump to get there.

[@WangNurMouth]

That changes depending upon the material they subsist of..neutron stars etc.

[@RuosongGao]

@@WangNurMouth Black holes aren't "made of" anything- and the "size" of the black hole, which we here take to mean the radius of the event horizon, is simply proportional to mass. It doesn't matter what type of matter you throw into the black hole, a neutron star or plasma or a bunch of water, the proportional relation is maintained.

[@GrotesqueSmurf]

the "size" of a black hole is it's event horizon, which is determinde by the Schwarzschild-radius. it doesn't matter what it was made of before it became a black hole.@@WangNurMouth

[@enlightendbel]

As for the tools, telescopes that capture various EM frequencies and fucktons of computer power. We "see" black holes by their effects on surrounding matter, as we can't see the black hole itself. There's quite a few ways to determine if there's a black hole somewhere. Among them the followng: The accretion disk, which surrounds supermassive black holes, as stated in the video, is a mass of superheated plasma that's actually quite bright. So we can see what's around it, even if we can't see it itself. For smaller black holes there's various ways you can notice them, like when you see a star wobble, you know another massive object is near enough to it to influence its orbit and when there isn't any other bright object near it, you can deduct that there's likely a black hole near it, massive enough to influence its orbit, but not visible. There's also the radiation black holes spew out, which can be detected, but that radiation is directional, so if the jets are pointed to the sides from our perspective, we can't detect those. There's gravitational lensing, where we look at a patch in the sky and notice multiple of the same star in the same patch of sky. If there isn't a galaxy in the way to lens the light of stars behind it to show up this way, a black hole can create the same effect. So while we can't see the black hole, we can see its effects. A lot of this is detected by combining tons of data and modeling the motions of stars and entire regions of space by what we know to be there. If what we simulate by what we know to be there isn't the same as what we see happening, we know there is something there that we don't see. Then, depending on what the actual motions there are, we can theorize if it's a black hole, a concentration of dark matter or energy, or something else. These are just a few of the ways we can see the effects of black holes in space, without being able to see the actual black hole. This is why the addition of James Webb and several other current gen telescopes combined with the ever advancing compute capabilities around the world and space has brought us so much new detections of planets, black holes and so much more. The more information you have and power you have to simulate how things should be with the information you have, the better you know when things aren't behaving as they should taking what you know into account, leaving you with the information that there's something else, which we can't see (yet), influencing the modeled area. As for the "size" question, more mass means more influence, so the more something we can't see influences the stars and galaxies around it, the more mass we know it has. And we have decent grasp on how mass correlates to influencing other stellar objects, so we can calculate, from the aberrant trajectories, what kind of mass is influencing it.

[@Rusko181]

As a warning. You can get addicted to the videos of Kurzgesagt. Be careful.

[@The_Story_Of_Us]

You don't see black holes, you just see the galactic-level destruction happening around them as they swallow more matter than we can imagine. I swear man, these things give me existential dread just knowing they're out there, not that they'll really affect us with how far away they are, but just picturing that much solar violence is frightening.

[@v9x-sp]

You almost have 100K subs 🫡 Salute to you on the journey. I’ve been watching since you had like 10 videos up I think this is the fastest I’ve seen a channel rise so Kudos 👏

[@NoProtocol]

Hey, thanks for sticking with me that long! I’m just glad you’re still liking the videos (:

[@jonnekallu1627]

I have a sneaking suspicion that the biggest black holes in our universe are older than our universe.

[@enlightendbel]

The double age paper shows why it's so important to make a distinction between papers and peer reviewed papers (and even peer reviewed papers need to be looked at critically as there are special interests that seek to warp the system). Students and scientists put out papers all the time. It's by getting a consensus among them through peer review, we know if the paper is likely to be correct or not. Special interest groups have made it far to common for just about any paper to be used in articles and legislation, to support their view on things. They've made it common amongst the general population to do the same, where they support their faulty notions with badly understood papers that they neglect to check peer review on and even when the papers are peer reviewed and shown faulty, decide to ignore, because only the faulty paper supports their prejudices. And scientists are still very well aware that even peer reviewed material can still be wrong, be it through orchestrated malice (like oil companies paying people to review environmental studies in their favor) or plain simply the fact the current understood science may be just a bit off. Like with this video, what this video states to be the largest known black hole, is no longer the largest known black hole. All thanks to science getting a few more tools in their repertoire to find even older and larger ones. Tools like the James Webb among others. Even the most established scientific theories get tweaked from time to time, with new information.

[@kiraoshiro6157]

"welp, it's hospital time" - lactose intolerant person who just ate a TON of cheese

[@iRenegade164]

A perfect counterpart for this presentation would be Rush's epic song Cygnus X-1, Book 1, in which 'our hero' pilots his ship (Rosinante) into the black hole. We had to wait for the next album's release for the end of our hero's journey in Book 2!

[@G.B.B.]

Great channel. They made a mistake in the video at 4:17 saying the 2 black holes were discovered in a galaxy 17 Billion LY away.

[@satanicbananam4734]

The "Falling into a Black Hole" video is the scariest thing I've ever seen A giant, inescapable, absolutely black void

[@Guilhermelongaray]

Talking about músics about universe, there's two songs that I recommend. 1. Center of the universe, by kamelot. Light metal. 2. Age of false innocence, by blind guardian. The first is about the place of humanity on the universe and god existence. The second is about Galileo and is persecution by the Catholic church and how the universe was seen on different times. Hope you all like it

[@panpiper]

In the early 1960s, I was maybe five, six years old, my father got a visit from a traveling salesman selling encyclopedias. He was quite adamant that it had articles in it explaining anything I could imagine. I wasn't buying his hard sell. He challenged me to name a subject that wasn't in it. I asked him to find something about black holes. He had no clue what I was talking about, but he dutifully looked it up in the index. Unsurprisingly there was no article on black holes. He suggested I name something else. I said anti-matter. Again he had no clue what I was talking about, but he looked it up in the index. No such entry. My father sent him packing. A year later my father found an encyclopedia that had both entries and bought it.

[@CupUhhJo]

This 100% gave me a low-mid level existential crisis 😂

[@killman369547]

Modern day we use a bunch of different telescopes and observatories all over the world that all combine their data to produce those ultra deep space images. It's like having a telescope the size of earth without actually having to build a planet sized telescope.

[@clairelee94]

If you're ever looking for channel that goes much more in-detail with astrophysics stuff and explains more of the actual physics behind these things, I'd very highly recommend PBS Space Time! It leans a bit more into the education, and a bit less into the entertainment, but Dr Matt O'Dowd, the host, does an excellent job at making the idea and concepts digestible! Also, I love your videos!

[@Themata]

That monster was that big 10 billion years ago. Feels like "awesome" is the appropriate term

[@Gypsy_Danger_TMC]

NO INTRO LADY! hope you're good its been a while since I've checked out your channel. I love Kurzgesagt! they did a great version of the egg story. But this must be an older video as a few years ago we did actually observe a black hole..

[@vohbovohborian28]

About 9:10 : The accuracy of the mass of Cygnus A is about 2.5 +/- 0.7 million solar masses. The Schwarzschild radius of a Black Hole is directly calculated from its mass, which makes it quite easy to do. We can measure the mass by calculating the speed and distance of the "stuff" orbiting it.

[@AeipoxPlays]

With respect to your question of "what technology are we using to 'observe' black holes?". I did black hole research at Michigan State University as an undergrad. My research was 'X-ray timing (Fourier) analysis of intermediate-mass accreting black holes within stellar systems of globular cluster 47 Tucanae, looking for QPO's (Quasi-Periodical Oscillations).' [[ Which basically means I look at a light curve (in the X-ray spectrum) coming from known sources of parasitic black holes (with an accretion disk) that pull gas from a partner star and look for slight 'bumps' or 'dips' in the light curve over the course of a certain period of time (which would mean the black hole is either eating more or less than is usually does during a very short period). ]] The fantastic thing about collecting data via satellites previously used for other research purposes is that all the data is still there sitting in a database. As an undergrad there's almost no way to get satellite time for your own research (unless you discover something incredible and it warrants taking a closer look at). So, we can utilize the data that's already been collected. The researchers that were looking in the direction of 47 Tucanae may have been looking for something completely unrelated to what my research consisted of, yet, all the data I need is still there. There are tons and tons of gathered information just sitting around in NASA and other space-related databases waiting to be used for discovery. All that's required is a curiosity for the unknown and a solid foundation in Python-based coding as you'll need to write your own code to pull from the databases and build your custom-made computational model. This is just one method of 'observing' black holes and their habits.

[@jamiegossett]

the scary thing is that one supermassive black hole in a colliding galaxy forced another supermassive black hole out of the galaxy that it collided with. how many rogue black holes of different size and masses are out there not accompanied by hot glowing material. they are not stationary. over 100 million black holes are wandering our galaxy right now.

[@KAKUN_DESU]

i love your kurzgesagt reactions!

[@cavetroll666]

Pacman ill never get that out of my head now when thinking about black holes 😂

[@jamielandis4308]

A fun sci-fi book series that did black holes decades before “Interstellar,” is the “Gateway” series by Frederick Pohl. No spoilers, but there’s aliens and their relics, black holes, time dilation, dark matter, AI, machine-human interface plus lots of moral dilemmas and interesting philosophical stuff. The protagonist, Robinette Broadhead, is one of my all-time favorites from all genres and entertainment media. A music recommendation is “Fresh Aire V,” by Mannheim Steamroller. It is a new age style instrumental album about (if memory serves) a trip to the moon. If that doesn’t entice, you may want to sample the rock / semi-prog concept album “Children of The Sun,” by Billy Thorpe. One of rock’s saddest songs is the oft-overlooked “Nobody’s Home,” by Kansas. This one may even elicit a tear (of course, I’m a bit sentimental.)

[@ravenward626]

Besides Hawking's book on radiation created by gravity separating virtual particles along the event horizon I can't think of any books related to black holes. I can say that the giants we study from afar are aggregates of the small. Astronomy can be a pipeline to astrophysics, and from there it's a short jump into the minuscule mysteries of matter itself. On that note I'd suggest having a peek at some of the Feynman lectures.

[@grnlntrn3283]

You are... by far... the cutest content creator dealing with Astronomy. I am subbing. haha. Thanks!

[@scottdebruyn7038]

I was about to recommend Dr. Becky's book but, see it's been recommended. Neil deGrasse Tyson has an amazing book for the average person too in 'Astrophysics for People in a Hurry'. A thought always leaves me struggling with regard to both black holes as well as 'gravity wells' around masses like planets or stars. In both cases we think of a hole... like in a piece of paper or a hole in the bottom of a pool or bucket. But in that, the thought is 2 dimensional. The water falls out the bottom or you go through the piece of paper. But think of a sphere and it's always of falling into the center... regardless of the perspective (above, below, in-front, behind, right or left). Now think about a black hole. Pick a direction. You always fall towards its center. Now for the part that always f's with my head... how do you draw that? Especially if there is no accretion disk around it. Pick a perspective and visualize a hole in space... I can conceptualize it but not visualize it, much less draw it. Ouch. My head hurts again! 😒😏🤔

[@obscillesk]

You can fly out to Sag A* in Elite: Dangerous, they do the visual distortion well, but they don't simulate an accretion disk so its not all bright and cool and huge like in Interstellar. Dyson Sphere Project lets you 'land' on an event horizon and see the universe as a small circle *wayyyyyyy* up above you. Cause you know, all light ever is now in your past (relativity rears its head very angrily once gravity, time, and space all get tangled up like this), so your view of the universe outside sort of turns into a disc directly opposite the singularity (which is now your only 'forward') from your perspective. the LIGO observatory is whats given us so much new data on black holes and neutron stars. It's a pair of laser beams fired down a mile long tunnel each, and using mirrors and clever shenanigans, they can measure gravity waves by the deflection of the laser from the mirror array for a non black hole (we think) large gravitational source, look up the Great Attractor, and then for contrast, the Bootes Void

[@semaayee2800]

TON 618, The king of kings... Phoenix A* : "Hold my beer ! " 😅

[@Astro2024]

As of 2022, the largest black hole is actually Phoenix A which is 100 billion solar masses conpared to TON 619 66 billion suns

[@ravenward626]

@05:12 That's an interesting concept. All of our astronomical observations come from studying ripples in the electrical fields around us, but those ripples have a have a speed limit. Even the cosmic background radiation takes time to reach us. There could very well be more space beyond those distances that we simply can't observe yet. I've yet to hear (and understand) why our observable universe couldn't be a localized phenomenon. By that I mean I wonder what prevents multiple "big bangs" from occurring in parallel separated by distance. Maybe we are in a reverberation, a smaller sequential explosion as matter is thrown apart and condensed again into multiple smaller clumps causing multiple smaller and isolated big bangs. But it seems like an impossible notion to test.

[@Whoami691]

Technically, nothing. but the concept is so far beyond our understanding there is literally no working hypothisis as to how such a phenominon could occour. Imagine an absence of everyone. As in, nothing. Just a void absent of any Energy or Matter. Our minds cannot comprehend of such a place. non existance is such a hard thing for us to grasp we just can't understand it.

[@ravenward626]

@@Whoami691 It's an oddly beautiful notion to imagine the void as a placid empty space. I wonder if it was ever such a way? Maybe even quantum foam is the perturbation of an ancient calm, and it's existence races ever outwards like a stone rippling the surface of an infinite pond.

[@wWvwvV]

9:23 I've only seen this far. The video didn't mention the crucial information about the relationship between mass, size and density of a black hole. Supermassive black holes can be huge in volume (Schwarzschild radius) and supermassive. But their density decreases the larger they get. This is because when the mass doubles, the Schwarzschild radius also doubles proportionally (linearly, but by a factor). As a result, the volume increases much faster (cubically) than the mass, hence the decrease in density.

[@wWvwvV]

For this reason, BLs are not the largest "objects" in the universe. They are not objects, but anomalies with a fringe.

[@Quique-sz4uj]

@@wWvwvV They meant the size of the event horizon

[@wWvwvV]

@@Quique-sz4uj the Schwarzschild radius is the event horizon (in a simplified model of a black hole without rotation). My point is ... what I wrote above.

[@merlith4650]

Idk, where i am supposed to send suggestions. But I'd like to suggest watching "Dinosaurs noone talks about" by "The budget museum"

[@charlesjones9860]

Her: " 00:29 " Me: *thinks back to last night with your mom*

[@peteramaranth85]

Old vid we in fact did see a black hole for the first time, seeing how tiny and insignificant humanity and our little problems are kinda shocks you into reality

[@gamm8939]

15:13 The pronunciation was better than most non-german speakers.

[@enzog8245]

You know it's big when the comparisons and examples are still too much to comprehend haha

[@joncrowe6034]

'Black Hole Sun' by Soundgarden

[@Stogie2112]

"Cygnus X-1" by Rush

[@Landsw-zj1sw]

What is the painting behind you? Very interesting.

[@tprnbs]

8:08 and(if i remember correctly), half of this remaining mass is owned by Jupiter edit: 9:12 we can't directly observe black holes with telescopes that detect x-rays, light, or other forms of electromagnetic radiation. We can find and study them by detecting their effect on visible objects nearby (edit: they said same thing later :P )

[@victormanteca7395]

You don't "observe" directly black holes... but there's a lot of activity around them, including huge accretion disks and gravitational disturbances all over the place.

[@GrotesqueSmurf]

We can get the size of the event horizon (Schwarzschild-radius) of black holes by first determining their mass by other means, for example observing orbiting stars. Then we can use the following formula: RS= (2*G*M)/c² (RS = schwarzschild radius, G = gravitational constant, M = mass of the object and c = speed of light) By this formula we would see that for example for the Earth to become a black hole, we would need to compress it until it's 8.87mm in radius.

[@oriongabriel6966]

We can see TON-618 because its accretion disc shines so extremely bright. We even thought it was a local blue star in the milky way because it was so bright up until the 70’s I think haha.

[@andrewgrant6516]

I would recommend The Time Ships by Stephen Baxter, because it contains a sequence of each thing being bigger than the last that reaches truly epic proportions and yet manages to stay in your head at once. Even imagining this stuff is hard work!

[@obscillesk]

Hah oh man I love that book. I'll recommend House of Suns by Alastair Reynolds for another one that plays with scale really well. (though the Revelation Space series is my favorite of his)

[@jcjjcc]

A couple years ago scientists found Phoenix A the new king of Black Holes. Ton 618 is about 400,000,000,000 km while Phoenix A is 590,500,000,000 km

[@Slowwavesix]

Hey NP, if you want a really good literary recommendation on this topic it's a book called The Universe and Beyond by Terrence dickinson. I think it's still in print because he used to update it every few years. It is probably the best astronomy book out there and was one of my favorites. Ahead of the original Cosmos book by Carl Sagan because it has a more direct approach. The older editions at least were illustrated by a man named Adolf Schaller who also Illustrated much of cosmos.

[@NoProtocol]

Hi, thank you so much for this recommendation! I’m not familiar with this book yet

[@louhill5448]

I've been listening to Ryo Fukui based on your recommendation, so thank you. Mostly his first album, Scenery.

[@NoProtocol]

Duh a good album! Glad you liked it (:

[@weorldedit]

You can find out the margin of error for the black holes mass on wikipedia. It says the mass of the cygnus a black hole is (2.5±0.7)×109 M☉.

[@samuelwhite934]

I took 3 years of german in HS and a LOT of duolingo afterwards. I cannot believe I never put it together that "kurzgesagt" meant "in short" or "in a nutshell". I'm salty right now.

[@michajastrzebski4383]

re: instrumentation used - situation depending, we can use all kinds of stuff. If the black hole has an active accretion disk (i.e. feeding on something) - its hard not to spot it. If its not feeding - we are limited to only calculations based on star trajectories/speeds in any given area (since, well, no emissions whatsoever)

[@Hoigwai]

There has been a lot of recent data pointing to an error on the estimated age of the universe. It will be interesting to see how long it takes for hardliners to let go of the current model.

[@srenkaarepetersen9034]

You're always a pleasure to listen to.

[@seanfortes7156]

An interesting video to watch after these types of videos, for contrast, would be a video the channel Veritasium uploaded, titled, "Why We Need To Teach Astronomy". When I was young, I was very fascinated by astronomy, and in my early teenage years, I would read books by Carl Sagan, save up money to buy a globe, because I was also interested in maps, and different countries. I felt that scale was really interesting, and good, in the sense of helping us get perspective on life and all that we might encounter. Such videos like this one by Kurzgesagt, tap into that wonder and joy, even if I also appreciate and enjoy a bit more of the technical aspects as far as the research and effort involved by scientists and people behind the scenes. Then the video by Veritasium, surprised me a little. I also want to be super blunt, because I don't want to seem judgemental or discouraging, because I know that people will have different interests, and passions, and not all people had a childhood interest in science, space and astronomy, and the means and interest to maintain that interest... I also grew up poor, so I know that often, just trying to live and survive can override everything else, including learning, which shouldn't still be a thing, but is.. anyway. Spoiler for the Veritasium, but it had some people who seemed normal, articulate, and intelligent, but some of them believed that the moon/moons was/were bigger than stars. Some thought that moons were bigger than planets, some of the other answers were quite inaccurate. Also, to be clear, the video or attitude of the video, wasn't mocking or condescending either, it really just stressed the importance of general education. I was surprised, but I did my best to not be too judgemental. Thinking back, my own public education didn't really cover much astronomy. Most of that I taught myself. Plus they live in a different country than me, with different educational backgrounds, so on. My surprise was mostly because I felt a bit sad, because I think such knowledge about space, the cosmos, and the perspective it can give, can create warm meaning and context, that can also bring empathy, kindness, and a bond with our fellow humans. So its really just that I don't want them or anyone to potentially miss out you know? So it also made me happy to see that they were also willing to learn and seemed excited by finding our more about space after giving their answers. Then I wonder how much it would probably blow their minds, to see this video, about supermassive black holes, and quasi stars, and scales, magnitudes in space and time we are dealing with. Anyway, I love this channel and its content, and would throughly recommend the Veritasium video to anyone who sees this comment. Since if you likely see this comment, chances are, you'll probably know a decent amount about space and cosmos, so it might be interesting to you, to see what you might consider common knowledge, may not be as widespread as you may assume (not to make assumptions about what you assume, and its also important to remember the Veritasium wasn't necessarily trying to make any claims about common knowledge, either, just interviewing some students). Cheers. Oh, and of course the other Kurzgesagt's videos are great too, as is the KZbinr Dr Becky. Also just some old videos of Carl Sagan talking about space should be up and around on KZbin as well, really enjoyable stuff.

[@ezraanderson1190]

Black hole video! Awesome! I love learning about them, they're one of the coolest things we know very little about. Also, Hello 😁

[@ProtusMose]

As for how we know characteristics about black holes (size, mass, etc), it's all mass. By definition, we can't observe the black hole directly. What we can measure, like it mentioned regarding Sagittarius A* at the center of the Milky Way, is the effect they have on other stars. We can measure the mass of stars pretty reliably the same way. Upwards of 85% of all stars are actually in binary systems. We can measure how they move around each other with fairly simple math to work out how massive they have to be to move that way. Once we work that out, we can treat the system as "a star" and we know how big something else has to be to make it move certain ways.

[@ThaBeatConductor]

IIRC The chandra x-ray observatory is what we use to see most of these objects. Black holes throw off a crazy amount of x-rays if they have an accretion disk.

[@HalfassDIY]

Black Holes and Time Warps: Einstein's Outrageous Legacy is a classic

[@Mike_Jones281]

Vegeta: If he has become a Super Sayain, I will become a Super D Super Sayian.

[@Funktastic_Ed]

Mass does not mean size in physics, it means energy as how great the gravity field of an object is. It is also different from weight, wich is how much an object is attracted to another because of its mass.

[@sv98753]

one of the ways finding black holes is the watching and studying of the gravitational lensing effect (you might wanna research arround that topic since its rather complex )

[@noujaadw]

The most fundamental property of a black hole is its mass. The mass of a black hole can be estimated by observing the motion of nearby objects, such as stars or gas clouds, that are influenced by the gravitational pull of the black hole. Kepler's laws of motion and Newton's law of gravitation can be applied to infer the mass of the black hole from the observed orbits.

[@CarlosRenfroe]

These comments fill up quick! Almost 100k subs. Congrats. You should do a book raffle for a 100k celebration.

[@_BLACKSTAR_]

I bet our entire universe is the interior of a black hole.That would explain the big bang, and dark energy, since we know our universe is expanding at an ever increasing rate.Which would make sense if infalling material from another dimension comes in thru a singularity point which is currently spread over the entire edge of our universe.Therefore all infalling material would be pushing the boundary "outward" from our perspective "pulling" everything away from everything else while increasing the size of spacetime in all directions.

[@joshuawillard9813]

It all was interesting. When he said that there was a black hole so big that another supermassive black hole orbiting it, everything else went out the window. Like,...WHAT!?

[@jokuz9133]

Fun channel. Thank you.

[@NoProtocol]

Thank you too Joe!

[@FatalFist]

I agree with you, I do believe our Universe is much older than we perceive and it is only because of how limited our vision is that we dated it by some 13 or so billion years. We only base this on what we see... not what could be beyond what we view.

[@KarmasAB123]

3:18 I feel like there's a Yoda metaphor in here somewhere.

[@TailRunnerOPSpec]

As another mentioned, there is a theoretical class above them that is being proposed, called Stupendously Large Black Holes (SLABs). Physics is getting insane.

[@Stogie2112]

X-ray telescopes are usually used to observe black holes, as they emit lots of X-rays.

[@tomduke1297]

your pronunciation is good. it could be a bit sharper, but it is totally fine as is. ;)

[@wrldonwill]

Is there a way to donate to the channel?

[@ragerancher]

Black holes are fascinating just because of how physics goes completely bonkers around them and so much counter-intuitive stuff goes on. Also with the age of the universe, we have 2 ways of measuring it. Over time they have got more and more precise. The problem is they have got more precise in opposite directions, so whilst originally there was an overlap between the 2 on the age of the universe, now the 2 methods give 2 different age ranges that no longer overlap, which is just a little bit of a problem.

[@grogu9698]

Mario Puzo also wrote the script for Richard Donner and Christopher Reeve´s Superman.

[@toddashton9696]

Here is a related music suggestion: You can check out the song Cygnus X-1 Book 1 and Book 2 by Rush. The songs chronicle the trip to the black hole Cygnus X-1. Great reactions, and thanks for your book recommendations.

[@jrod1591]

Dude. I really like your face. Hahaha idk. Just friendly. Good vid. You have a new subscriber

[@elusiveDEVIANT]

This video is not up to date, roughly a few billion years off. What many dont understand is when we say a billion light years away, its also a billion years ago. These black holes are far larger now.

[@Treadstone7]

I suggest you have a look at the band named Snarky Puppy, they are from the Netherlands. They have a very unique style with elements of Jazz, Rock and electronic music, often referred to as Fusion (guess why xD). I'd suggest their piece "Lingus" for a start.

[@thenicesven5328]

Please more kurzgesagt, they are great. (btw. i'm german, your pronounciation is actually pretty accurate)

[@getnis-m6g]

Stars colors decide what they’re made of, and with size we can discern mass, since black holes have the same density (i assume) we can infer a black hole size based on gravity worked on stars near it

[@pssthpok]

Great reaction! You remind me of the joy I felt learning about this kind of thing. But to pick a nit - black holes don't last forever, check up "Hawking Radiation", they slowly leak over time, and VERY eventually, disappear, possibly leaving behind a naked singularity, which sounds very witchy to me!

[@ANunes06]

The trouble with the universe being older than 13.8 billion years is that it would be cooked into the inflation or expansion and therefore kind of undetectable to us. We've revised the number up a few times before though, and detecting gravitational waves opens up possibilities of "seeing" past the CMBR wall. So who knows. Instead of like 380,000 years of cosmic history waiting for us on the other side, like we think now, it could be anything from nearly zero time to *literally* infinite.

[@jonasfermefors]

I just read about the problems they are currently having with Voyager 1 and it talked about the 22.5 hours it takes to get a signal from it.. 45 hours round trip. A quick calculation and I find that Voyager 1 is over 4000 times further from the Sun than the Earth is.. which gives me an overwhelming sense of scale knowing that V1 has just passed the edge of our solar system. So when a black whole is the size of our solar system.. it's big and unimaginably massive. Every proton sized space in something the size of our solar system containing the mass of a large mountain 🤯

[@raumzeitrelativ8615]

Music is just awesome!!! Lucio Battisti was my fathers absolute favorite musician... he used to play it all the time when we were driving to our Holidays in south Italy (hometown) every year for like 15 hours each way... I heard it so much, I have literally memorized almost his whole discography 😂... Hearing his music nowadays makes me feel like we're all together in that car, driving to holidays again...

[@trickedouttech321]

black holes don't eat anything, it is the space curved around the dense black object that eats. A black hole is a curved space. The more mass the more space curves in on itself, a black hole his the space around a massive object.

[@80Jay71]

How do we detect this? Well, you don't have to see a husband punch his wife to know he's an abusive man. You see the evidence on her. We watch how stars around these Black Holes move and in the gamma-spectrum you see the jets of energy they eject. These are truly magnificent objects!

[@chiefsalllday]

best intro ever. hey...lol, short and sweet...i hate long intros when i click on youtube videos haha

[@nastyonekenoby]

A good youtuber to watch with good astronomy and astrophysics information and discoveries is Anton Petrov. He seems to also be a good-hearted person.

[@cykassol368]

Love these videos. Dark Forest is another great space concept.

[@NoProtocol]

I’ve checked out that video in the past, I really liked it!

[@thepurplesmurf]

Woohoo, 100k very soon. Anything special planned?

[@80Jay71]

4:10 so those two black holes are 17+ billion lightyears away, but the universe is only 13-14 billion years old. Either someone messed up or space is expanding faster than light.

[@Stogie2112]

According to current cosmological theories, the space farthest away from us is indeed moving faster than light. The red-shifts of distant galaxies strongly suggest that the farther away a galaxy is, the faster it is moving. The current estimate of the size of the universe is more than 90 billion light-years in diameter.

[@80Jay71]

@@Stogie2112 As I said: The Universe is magnificent!

[@80Jay71]

@@Stogie2112 "Our", If I may ask, is who?

[@Stogie2112]

@@80Jay71 ….I don’t understand what you’re asking me. Could you elaborate?

[@80Jay71]

@@Stogie2112 I thought it was clear. If any point in space is the centre, then we can measure the speed foreign objects move relative to us. 17 billion Ly is almost twice the life of our universe as we know it. Ok?

[@airheart1]

Ton 618 is a menace.. lol.. that's a good line

[@obiwanbenobi4943]

Imagine if each atom core was really just a very tiny black hole... Or every subatomic particle? ... The Blackhole Unification Theory...

[@CapitalGearGaming]

By watching stars we can study, knowing their approximate size, mass etc, let's us estimate the size of black holes and their mass based off the speed and orbits of the stars. Plus a ton more. There is a second photo now of our Galaxy's black hole. Interestingly enough these photos are not the first, we have a Radio photo of Cygnus A and it's towering Radio jets. It can be found on Google quite easy but when NASA released it they weren't as active on social media like they are now. Ultramassive Black Holes as I understand are measured almost entirely with light, like JWST and Hubble. They're too bright to be any other known phenomenon as they are also too far to shine that brightly normally. Since we cant really study them any other way, it isn't a guarantee and there's big error bars on these. But size and mass is figured out based on distance and brightness. I imagine a lot more goes into it, such as radio telescopes and tons more, but I'm not that deep into the details. They no joke used to release on the Nasa website and that's it. Unless you looked for it, you wouldn't know it.

[@SimonJM]

Yet one more nudge toward @Dr. Becky and her book about Black Holes. For music - and now I am having bran fade ... something by Hawkwind (may be Space is Deep, I thik it's from the album Space Ritual), or, of course Black Holes by The Warning

[@bakauf4300]

Those crystal masks look like the "war masks" that martians wore in Bradbury's Martian Chronicles.

[@emanuelparedes9187]

I like how scientists just gave up on the scholarly names and just want "ultramassive" if they find something bigger will they call it "ultra-mega massive"? if they collide will it be the ultimate massive black hole throwdown? anyone ready to rumbleeeeeee?