How big is a Black Hole?




         There are at least two different ways to describe how big something is. We can say how much mass it has, or we can say how much space it takes up. Let's talk first about the masses of Black Holes.

         There is no limit in principle to how much or how little mass a Black Hole can have. Any amount of mass at all can in principle be made to form a Black Hole if you compress it to a high enough density. We suspect that most of the Black Holes that are actually out there were produced in the deaths of massive Stars, and so we expect those Black Holes to weigh about as much as a massive Star. A typical mass for such a Stellar Black hole would be about 10 times the mass of the Sun, or about 10^31 kilograms. Astronomers also suspect that many Galaxies harbor extremely massive Black Holes at their centers. These are thought to weigh about a million times as much as the Sun, or 10^36 kilograms.



         The more massive Black Hole is, the more space it takes up. In fact, the Schwarzschild radius (which means the radius of the horizon) and the mass are directly proportional to one another: If one Black Hole weighs ten times as much as another, its radius is ten times as large. A Black Hole with a mass equal to that of the Sun would have a radius of 3 kilometers. So a typical 10 solar mass Black Hole would have a radius of 30 kilometers and a million solar mass Black Hole at the center of the Galaxy would have a radius of 3 million kilometers. Three million kilometers may sound like a lot, but it's actually not so big by Astronomical Standards. The Sun, for example has a radius of about 700,000 kilometers, and so that supermassive Black Hole has a radius only about four times bigger than the Sun.

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