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Size comparison of a hypothetical quasi-star to some of the largest known stars. A quasi-star rendered with Celestia. A quasi-star (also called black hole star) is a hypothetical type of extremely large and luminous star that may have existed early in the history of the Universe.
The supermassive black hole at the core of Messier 87, here shown by an image by the Event Horizon Telescope, is among the black holes in this list.. This is an ordered list of the most massive black holes so far discovered (and probable candidates), measured in units of solar masses (M ☉), approximately 2 × 10 30 kilograms.
Size comparison of the event horizons of the black holes of TON 618 and Phoenix A.The orbit of Neptune (white oval) is included for comparison. As a quasar, TON 618 is believed to be the active galactic nucleus at the center of a galaxy, the engine of which is a supermassive black hole feeding on intensely hot gas and matter in an accretion disc.
Some black holes may have cosmological origins, and would then never have been stars. This is thought to be especially likely in the cases of the most massive black holes. Stellar black holes are objects with approximately 4–15 M ☉. Intermediate-mass black holes range from 100 to 10 000 M ☉.
Sagittarius A*, abbreviated as Sgr A* (/ ˈ s æ dʒ ˈ eɪ s t ɑːr / SADGE-AY-star [3]), is the supermassive black hole [4] [5] [6] at the Galactic Center of the Milky Way.Viewed from Earth, it is located near the border of the constellations Sagittarius and Scorpius, about 5.6° south of the ecliptic, [7] visually close to the Butterfly Cluster (M6) and Lambda Scorpii.
The black hole and star orbit the system barycentre every 11.6 years, with an orbital distance ranging from 4.5–29 AU. [3] The black hole's mass is 32.70 M ☉, the heaviest known stellar black hole in the Milky Way. The black hole Gaia BH3 is together with Cygnus X-1 the only known stellar black hole more massive than about 10 M ☉.
The black hole was imaged using data collected in 2017 by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), with a final, processed image released on 10 April 2019. [13] In March 2021, the EHT Collaboration presented, for the first time, a polarized-based image of the black hole which may help better reveal the forces giving rise to quasars. [14]
These black holes would then have more time than any of the above models to accrete, allowing them sufficient time to reach supermassive sizes. Formation of black holes from the deaths of the first stars has been extensively studied and corroborated by observations. The other models for black hole formation listed above are theoretical.