The most exciting event for an astronomer to behold is seeing a star supernova. It is witnessing the death of a mass that has been thriving for billions of years. Imagine personally discovering the explosion of a star that has been around billions of years longer then our Sun, it is mind-boggling. Other times stars die in a less glamorous and much darker way. When a super massive star meets its personal end by implosion, it becomes a black hole.
Black holes are matter hungry monsters that consume everything within it’s merciless gravitational pull. Even light cannot escape its veracious appetite. If your body had the misfortune of being close enough to a black hole to be sucked in, every last inch of you, and the matter you are made of, would be destroyed. What was left over would be compacted into the center of the hole at a point that is called a “singularity.” When I first heard of a black hole I was in elementary school and the idea of their mere existence frightened me. Now this fear hits a bit closer to home, now that many scientists believe there is a supermassive black hole in our own back yard, in our own galaxy.
A supermassive black hole as defined by NRAO is “A black hole that has a million or as much as a billion solar masses.” Supermassive black holes are a relatively new idea to science. If they truly exist, they are far more destructive then typical black holes. Scientists are not in agreement on whither not there is one of these entities dwelling within the center of our galaxy. What makes this subject truly tricky is the fact that as of yet, science cannot prove that black holes even exist at all. Though they are widely accepted as fact they are really still a great mystery. After watching interviews of numerous scientists, I am amazed at the amount of times I heard the most brilliant minds alive today say “we just do not know.”
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