The Black Sheep of Black Holes
The Indian-American astrophysicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar once remarked that black holes, regions of spacetime whose gravitational field is so strong that not even light can escape its clutches, are the simplest, most perfect macroscopic objects in the universe. Yet that simplicity hasn’t prevented the universe from becoming populated with a veritable zoo of black holes. They appear to range in mass from a few times to many billions of times more massive than the sun.
Stellar mass black holes, the ones formed by collapsing stars, are thought to be the most abundant. Occasionally they get on gravitational waves, the elastic rippling of spacetime that radiates away the energy released by the merger. Black holes thousands of times more massive could have formed in the early universe, when exotic objects called were thought to abound, powered not by nuclear reactions but the infall of hot gas towards a rapidly growing central black hole seed. More massive still are supermassive black holes, with masses up to billions of times that of the sun, thought to be the gravitational anchor at the center of larger galaxies like ours. How these form remains something of a .
