It is thought that these are the black holes that merge to form the supermassive variety. They’re still a bit of a mystery, with only a few having been discovered, but they’re each believed to have a mass of between 100 and 100,000 Suns. 4 Intermediate-mass black holes are a third category that – as the name suggests – falls somewhere between the previous two. It is thought that this type of black hole reaches its enormous size by merging with other black holes, as well as by subsuming stars. 3 The largest, known as supermassive black holes, can have masses that are millions if not billions of times the mass of the Sun. They form after the centre of a large star collapses, causing a supernova (the explosion of a star). Stellar-mass black holes are the smallest between 1 and 100 times the mass of the Sun. Astronomers believe that most spiral and elliptical galaxies have black holes at their centres. 1īlack holes are objects with extreme density, and the amount of mass they have means they have so much gravitational pull that even light gets trapped. If the core's mass is more than about three times the mass of the Sun, the force of gravity overwhelms all the other forces, the remnant collapses and produces a black hole. Black holes are forged from the small, dense, remnant cores of dead stars.
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