- IWSMT has amazing images, videos and anectodes to waste your time on ... even though it is no bigger than the solar system and lies in the heart of a galaxy known as M87, 55 million light-years away. 1,696 points • 179 comments - Size comparison of the M87 black hole. The M87 black hole image showed the best way to measure black hole masses Its diameter suggests the black hole is 6.5 billion times the mass of the sun A black hole of billions of solar masses is the size of the solar system while a black hole with the mass of the universe is surprisingly close to the size of the universe. Combined, this array acts like a telescope the size of Earth, and it was able to collect more than a petabyte of data while staring at M87’s black hole in April 2017. This comic shows the picture of the M87 black hole by the Event Horizon Telescope that was published on the same day as this comic. A black hole the size of the solar system. ... like the supermassive black hole at the center of M87. Black hole diameters scale surprisingly fast with mass. Keep in mind, M87’s black hole is between about 3 and 7 billion times the mass of the Sun, or about 1,000 times more massive than the Milky Way’s black hole, Sagittarius A*. Comparison. We are used to spherical objects scaling to the cube root of mass but black holes scale directly proportional to mass. In 2019, the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) Collaboration, including a team of MIT Haystack Observatory scientists, delivered the first image of a black hole, revealing M87* — the supermassive object in the center of the M87 galaxy.The EHT team has used the lessons learned last year to analyze the archival data sets from 2009 to 2013, some of which were not published before. M87 Black Hole Size Comparison (Credit: xkcd) Hubble's Extraordinary ULLYSES Program Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center As a point of comparison, the black hole at the centre of the Milky Way is 1,000 times smaller. Quick sidebar on sound before we proceed: recall that sound travels at … The black hole at the heart of the relatively close Messier 87 Galaxy (M87) weighs in at 6.4 billion times the mass of our Sun, according to US astrophysicist Karl … This special distance is the “event horizon” of the whirlpool. Black holes are some of the most violent objects in the universe. ... Take this black hole, for example. The black hole, dubbed M87*, spans a whopping 100 billion kilometers in diameter and if we exclude the giant ring of trapped light, it still is 38 billion kilometers wide.