NASA animation shows 10 of the biggest black holes in the universe | Watch

Video Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center Conceptual Image Lab

NASA is celebrating Black Hole Week - a special week-long celebration dedicated to one of the most intriguing and mysterious objects in the universe. This whole week (May 1 to May 5, 2023), the agency will be sharing information about these strange cosmic balls of gravity through videos, pictures, sonifications or stories.

To begin with, black holes are objects in space where the gravitational pull is so strong that nothing, not even light, can escape. This means that we can't see black holes directly, but rather we can observe their effects on nearby matter, such as gas and stars.

As part of the Black Hole Week celebrations, NASA has shared an animation that showcases the "super" in ten supermassive black holes in the universe. From the smallest to the largest ever observed, the above animation provides a stunning visual representation of the vastness of these cosmic behemoths lurking in the centers of most big galaxies, including our own Milky Way.

It's worth noting that there are no massive black holes anywhere near our solar system. Despite being thousands or even billions of times more massive than our sun, these black holes are located far away from us, in the distant corners of our galaxy or beyond.

The movie begins with 1601+3113, a dwarf galaxy hosting a black hole packed with the mass of 100,000 Suns, and ends with TON 618, a behemoth containing more than 60 billion solar masses.

The black hole at the centre of our home galaxy is called Sagittarius A* and it boasts the weight of 4.3 million Suns. It is located 26,000 light years from Earth.

Watch this video to see how these supersized black holes compare to each other and to our solar system.