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Supermassive Black Hole ○꠹｜Definition｜1st｜20260912181021-00-⌔

Supermassive black hole - Wikipedia

Supermassive black hole

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A supermassive black hole (SMBH or sometimes SBH)1 is the largest type of black hole, with its mass being on the order of hundreds of thousands, or millions to billions, of times the mass of the Sun (M). Black holes are a class of astronomical objects that have undergone gravitational collapse, leaving behind spheroidal regions of space that nothing, not even light, can escape. Observational evidence indicates that almost every large galaxy has a supermassive black hole at its center.23 For example, the Milky Way galaxy has a supermassive black hole at its center, corresponding to the radio source Sagittarius A﹡.45 Accretion of interstellar gas onto supermassive black holes is the process responsible for powering active galactic nuclei (AGNs) and quasars.6

Two supermassive black holes have been directly imaged by the Event Horizon Telescope; these are Sagittarius A﹡, at the center of the Milky Way, and the black hole at the center of Messier 87, a giant elliptical galaxy.78

Printed 2026-09-12.

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Footnotes

  1. The acronym SBH is commonly used for stellar-mass black hole. ↩

  2. Kormendy, John; Richstone, Douglas (1995), “Inward Bound—The Search For Supermassive Black Holes In Galactic Nuclei”, Annual Review of Astronomy and Astrophysics, 33: 581, Bibcode:1995ARA&A..33..581K, doi:10.1146/annurev.aa.33.090195.003053 ↩

  3. Kormendy, John; Ho, Luis (2013). “Coevolution (Or Not) of Supermassive Black Holes and Host Galaxies”. Annual Review of Astronomy and Astrophysics. 51 (1): 511–653. arXiv:1304.7762. Bibcode:2013ARA&A..51..511K. doi:10.1146/annurev-astro-082708-101811. S2CID 118172025. ↩

  4. Ghez, A.; Klein, B.; Morris, M.; Becklin, E (1998). “High Proper-Motion Stars in the Vicinity of Sagittarius A﹡: Evidence for a Supermassive Black Hole at the Center of Our Galaxy”. The Astrophysical Journal. 509 (2): 678–686. arXiv:astro-ph/9807210. Bibcode:1998ApJ…509..678G. doi:10.1086/306528. S2CID 18243528. ↩

  5. Schödel, R.; et al. (2002). “A star in a 15.2-year orbit around the supermassive black hole at the centre of the Milky Way”. Nature. 419 (6908): 694–696. arXiv:astro-ph/0210426. Bibcode:2002Natur.419..694S. doi:10.1038/nature01121. PMID 12384690. S2CID 4302128. ↩

  6. Frank, Juhan; King, Andrew; Raine, Derek J. (January 2002). “Accretion Power in Astrophysics: Third Edition”. Accretion Power in Astrophysics. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Bibcode:2002apa..book…F. ISBN 0-521-62053-8. ↩

  7. Overbye, Dennis (May 12, 2022). “Has the Milky Way’s Black Hole Come to Light? - The Event Horizon Telescope reaches again for a glimpse of the”unseeable."". The New York Times. Retrieved May 12, 2022. ↩

  8. Lea, Robert (May 11, 2022). “Sagittarius A﹡: The Milky Way’s supermassive black hole”. Space.com. Retrieved October 29, 2023. ↩

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