NASA releases stunning visuals each day for ‘Black Hole Week’

To celebrate Black Hole Week from May 1-5, NASA has released eye-catching images and animations of the celestial monstrosity each day.

Kicking off the week, the United States space agency on Monday published an animation comparing the sizes of objects in the solar system to black holes of different sizes to demonstrate “the ‘super’ in supermassive black holes.”

“The black holes shown, which range from 100,000 to more than 60 billion times our Sun’s mass, are scaled according to the sizes of their shadows – a circular zone about twice the size of their event horizons,” NASA said.

The video concludes with Tonantzintla 618 (Ton 618), the largest black hole ever recorded, with a mass equivalent to 60 billion suns.

Astronomers believe nearly all galaxies, including our own, have these giant black holes at their center, where light and matter cannot escape, making it extremely hard to get images of them.

Light gets chaotically bent and twisted around by gravity as it gets sucked into the abyss along with superheated gas and dust.

Additionally, the agency on Monday released an image taken by the Hubble Space Telescope image of a galaxy, NGC 3489, with an active galactic nucleus (AGN) at its core, which emits radiation from across the electromagnetic spectrum and is powered by black holes.

NASA also released a model of two black holes merging.

An image of the galaxy NG 3489. Credit: NASA, ESA, P. Erwin (Max-Planck-Institut fur extraterrestrische Physik), L. Ho (Peking University), and S. Kaviraj (University of Hertfordshire); Processing: Gladys Kober (NASA/Catholic University of America)

On Tuesday, the agency published an image of the galaxy Centaurus A, with a black hole visibly spewing out energy as it feeds off the material around it.

An image of the galaxy Centaurus A, released by NASA for Black Hole Week. Credit: X-ray: (IXPE): NASA/MSFC/IXPE/S. Ehlert et al.; (Chandra): NASA/CXC/SAO; Optical: ESO/WFI; Image processing: NASA/CXC/SAO/J.Schmidt

Another gives a glimpse of the spiral galaxy NGC 4395 — a Seyfert galaxy, which is a type of galaxy that hosts AGNs.

A Hubble telescope image of the spiral galaxy NGC 4395. Credit: NASA, ESA, DSS, A. Barth (University of California – Irvine), D. Calzetti (University of Massachusetts – Amherst), R. Chandar (University of Toledo), D. Crenshaw (Georgia State University Research Foundation), S. Larsen (Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen), W. Maksym (Smithsonian Institution Astrophysical Observatory), E. Sabbi (STScI), and R. Tully (University of Hawaii); Processing: Gladys Kober (NASA/Catholic University of America)

On Wednesday, NASA released a feature describing “spaghettification” — when an object is stretched in the direction of a black hole as it approaches.

The agency also published an image of two interacting galaxies that host AGNs.

A Hubble telescope photo of interacting galaxies AM 1214-255. Credit: NASA, ESA, A. Barth (University of California – Irvine), and J. Dalcanton (University of Washington); Processing: Gladys Kober (NASA/Catholic University of America)

On Thursday, NASA posted an x-ray photo of the galaxy Messier 84 (M84).

A composite image of M84 with X-ray data from Chandra (blue) and radio emission from the Very Large Array (red) overlaid on an optical image. Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/Princeton Univ/C. Bambic et al.; Optical: SDSS; Radio: NSF/NRAO/VLA/ESO; Image processing: NASA/CXC/SAO/N.Wolk

The black hole at the center of it expels jets of gas, which results in the appearance of an “H” shape, around 40,000 light-years in size, due to its orientation toward the Earth.

A photo of NGC 547 — described as a bright radio galaxy because it hosts regions of radio emissions powered by the AGN at its center — was also released.

Elliptical galaxy NGC 547 (bottom right) shines beside its companion NGC 545. Credit: NASA, ESA, J. Blakeslee (NOIRLab – (AZ)), and W. Sparks (SETI Institute); Processing: Gladys Kober (NASA/Catholic University of America)

Friday’s images had yet to be released at time of publication.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.