On April 10 of this year, scientists were finally able to do the unthinkable: they allowed humanity to look directly into the abyss of a supermassive black hole and take a photo as if it were some kind of black hole. tourist attraction! Today it turns out that even after such achievements, we still don't know much about black holes, because one of them challenges the entire scientific community with new impossible feats. In mid-July 2019, black holes intrigued astronomers again. New observations made possible thanks to the famous Hubble telescope by the team of European scientists. Their study showed that a relatively small and stingy black hole at the heart of NGC 3147 contradicts all our expectations by almost completely mimicking its much larger siblings. To show you how exceptional this discovery is, I will have to start from the fundamental question: say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why violent video games should not be banned”?Get an original essayWhat is a black hole? It is the smallest and heaviest possible object in the Universe, it can easily swallow stars whole and appears absolutely invisible to the human eye. But wait a minute! So what was this giant orange thing clearly visible in the photos? Have scientists fooled us with another computer simulation? No not at all. The photos are as real as possible. Except that the image in the photos does not depict a black hole itself. Let me explain. Each black hole was once a bright star like any other you can see in the night sky. At the end of its life, a star can collapse in on itself and condense all of its enormous mass into a tiny point of space. Such an incredibly dense object will produce a gravitational force that will nearly tear a hole in spacetime itself and bend the only matter of reality around itself. From the moment of collapse, this monstrous gravity will greedily attract and consume every bit of matter around it. Even the lightest and fastest particles in the Universe, like the photons of which light is made, could not escape this unstoppable force. The core and center of mass of this virtualized black hole are called a singularity. This is the sole cause of all the madness happening near black holes. The mass of this thing can range from hundreds of millions of the mass of the Sun to hundreds of billions! And it takes up so little space in volume that its density is almost infinite. No wonder this thing seems to break every law of physics! In fact, it's the density that's most exciting about black holes. You see, it turns out that any object can become a small black hole if it's compressed enough. For example, our planet would have to be barely a third of an inch in size to become a tiny singularity in itself and start bending reality on itself. Of course, this can't happen at all, but it happens to exhausted stars. The surrounding space near the singularity is the notorious event horizon. This is exactly why black holes are called black, even though that's not entirely true. Normally, you can tell something is black because that color doesn't reflect light at any of its wavelengths. The event horizon of black holes is black because none of the light that enters it can escape. Black holes are not black, they are completely absent from the visible world, they are not only invisible: they are more than a tangible manifestation of nothingness for any devicesensitive to light. The one and only of its kind in the entire Universe. The thing that makes the black hole visible and is depicted in recently released photos of one of them lies beyond the event horizon. This is called the accretion disk. This very luminous disk of matter, swirling towards the center of a black hole like in a giant drain, forms a quasar. Quasars have their place among the oldest celestial bodies known to humanity because their immense luminosity can eclipse the total light of an entire group of stars put together. This brightness is possible because all the mass surrounding a black hole rotates around it at one-tenth the speed of light. Such rapid movement leads to constant bursts of radiation and some of it manifests in the visible spectrum as light and heat. Accretion disks consist mainly of superheated gases and space dust and the speed of their movement is greater the closer they get to the event horizon. The largest and brightest accretion disks are considered to have supermassive black holes located at the hearts of the largest and brightest galaxies. And it's pretty easy to guess why. The more matter a black hole has to feast on, the greater its mass. Its event horizon also expands and an accretion disk forms around it. This is exactly why the black hole of NGC 3147 is so unique. He's not supposed to have one, but he does. Let's compare some galaxies and black holes at their centers to explore this glaring difference further. The brightest example by any measure may be the black hole in the middle of the largest galaxy we know of and also the brightest galaxy in its cluster. This galaxy is so big that it would be quite difficult to imagine it using numbers alone. Imagine if this colossus would replace our own galaxy. If this happened, it would replace not only the Milky Way, but also several neighboring galaxies surrounding us. This colossus is the galaxy IC 1101. When it was first discovered, it was mistaken for a huge orange nebula, the result of a supernova explosion. It took several years to discover the shocking truth: the orange color we see is the light of probably 100 trillion stars gathered in an elliptical galaxy. Most of them looked like ancient red dwarf stars, giving off their tired yellow and orange light. But the biggest surprise was hidden in the middle of it all. The supermassive black hole at the heart of IC 1101 is a good fit for its immense galaxy. This terrifying monster is heavier than about 40 billion solar masses. The accretion disk is as huge and luminous as one could hope for. It's quite similar to that black hole in photos. Only these enormous black holes, sometimes called ultramassive, give us a rare chance of detecting them visibly. Let’s get closer to home for a moment. Our galaxy is much smaller than IC 1101 and less luminous. The Milky Way is only 100,000 light years across, which seems like nothing compared to IC 1101's supposed 6 million light years across. But our galaxy is still rich enough to properly power its black holes . The Milky Way's most notable black hole is found in the constellation Sagittarius, right in the middle of the spiral of stars that is essentially our galaxy. We are 26,000 light years away and it is more than 4 billion times heavier than the Sun, making it a supermassive black hole. Although the Sagittarius A-Star black hole is shrouded in gas clouds from our point2635