7 Sсary Levels Of Black Holes

Added: 2026-06-07

[00:00:00]What if everything we call the universe is actually the inside of a giant black hole?

[00:00:15]That sounds insane, doesn't it? But if you take the approximate mass of the observable universe and you plug it into the Schwart shield radius formula, the result comes out frighteningly close to the scale of our cosmos. Stay tuned until the end. The answer is hidden at the seventh level. Level one, primordial black holes. Forget about thinking of them as giant funnels in space. Some hypothetical primordial black holes could have been smaller than a single atom. But inside this subatomic speck, impossible to see even through the most powerful microscope, the mass of an entire mountain or a large asteroid, tens of billions of tons, is compressed.

[00:01:02]If such a black hole flew through the Earth at immense speed, we most likely wouldn't see a Hollywood style apocalypse. It would simply pierce the planet almost straight through like an invisible bullet. The planet would barely register its passage, leaving behind only a very faint, barely detectable seismic and gravitational trace. Where do these monsters, smaller than an atom, come from? Well, they weren't born from dead stars. Stars simply didn't exist back then. In the very first fractions of a second after the Big Bang, our universe was an incredibly dense, seething, red-hot quantum soup, space expanded at an inconceivable speed. But matter was distributed somewhat unevenly. And if in some random microscopic region, the energy density exceeded a critical threshold, that matter could collapse in on itself. Even before the cosmos cooled down in some scenarios, the early universe could have been seated with a massive number of such invisible gravity traps. But physics is unforgiving.

[00:02:16]Nothing lasts forever, not even black holes. Stephven Hawking showed us that way back when when he discovered that black holes will eventually and very, very slowly evaporate, radiating energy back into space. The rule is brutally simple. The smaller the black hole, the faster it disappears. So, the tiniest of them dissolved into the void at the dawn of time. But those whose birth mass was equal to, let's say, a small asteroid have been evaporating for billions of years. And right now, they might be approaching the end of their lives. The final moments of such a black hole are not a quiet fading. It would be an incredibly powerful but extremely brief burst of high energy gamma rays. A final flash where the remaining mass is converted into pure radiation. The fermy gam the fermy gamma ray fairmy or fermy let me check that pronunciation. Hold on. Fmy or fairmy? I should know that.

[00:03:27]What?

[00:03:28]>> Fermy.

[00:03:28]>> Fummy. Fermy. Fair or fairmy? Oh, both.

[00:03:33]Okay. Fermy or Fairmy. That's why. The Fermy Gammarray Space Telescope has been searching for such signals in the depths of space for 15 years. The result, so far, scientists haven't found a single convincing candidate. But this doesn't prove that primordial black holes don't exist. It simply strictly limits their number near to us. Either there are very few of them or their mass distribution and evaporation frequency lie beyond our current observational capabilities.

[00:04:08]Level two, stellar mass black holes. We leave the hypothetical microcosm and move on to those objects whose existence we can prove. These are the black holes you've heard about. For billions of years, a normal star lives in a state of perfect yet fragile balance. It's a grandiose cosmic tugofwar. Thermonuclear reactions constantly occur at the stars core, releasing colossal amounts of energy that push the star outward from the inside. Meanwhile, its own monstrous gravity tries to crush it from the outside. But it lives in a balance between these two forces. As long as there is fuel, the star holds its shape.

[00:04:54]But one day that chain of thermonuclear burning reaches its limit. Iron accumulates in the core from which no more energy can be extracted through fusion. The outward pressure vanishes and gravity wins. If the remnant core of the dying star weighs more than two to three times the mass of our sun, the pressure of the matter itself can no longer halt the collapse. The core's material plunges inward at enormous speed in a fraction of a second. The star loses its support. The outer layers of the star blast off into the universe in a blinding supernova explosion while the core falls forever into darkness. It compresses into a sphere from which light will never escape again. It becomes a black hole. Typically, the mass of such objects ranges from a few to tens of solar masses. According to modern estimates, there could be tens of millions of them in the Milky Way alone.

[00:06:00]Most are entirely invisible. We only notice them when they do something like start stripping plasma from neighboring stars, swirling it into a glowing disc or when they collide with each other.

[00:06:15]In 2015, the LIGO Observatory detected such a merger for the first time. This was an absolute triumph of astrophysics.

[00:06:25]Far beyond our galaxy, two black holes circled in a deadly dance until they finally merged into each other. In mere fractions of a second, an amount of energy equivalent to about three solar masses. Three of our suns completely converted into gravitational waves, distortions in spaceime itself that rippled all the way to us here on Earth.

[00:06:49]The remnant left behind was incredibly compact. The mass of dozens of suns was compressed into a region only a few hundred kilometers across. Wow, so cool.

[00:07:03]Level three, intermediate black holes.

[00:07:06]For decades, astrophysicists looked at the universe and saw a frightening void in it. We knew about stellar black holes, and we' long known about galactic giants weighing millions of suns. But in between them lay an inexplicable gap.

[00:07:23]Black holes weighing hundreds or thousands of suns seemed to be missing from the universe. The problem wasn't that physics forbade their existence in principle. The problem was that the standard death of a single massive star couldn't easily explain this range. The zone around 100 solar masses was especially problematic. Stellar evolution theory predicts a pair instability effect. If a star is too massive, the temperature at its core becomes so extreme that photons begin turning into pairs of particles and anti-particles.

[00:07:59]The pressure drops, the star violently compresses and then an uncontrolled thermonuclear explosion occurs. Such an extremely massive star can completely obliterate itself in the explosion, scattering its matter across space and leaving no compact remnant behind.

[00:08:19]Because of this, for a long time, all we had were controversial candidates.

[00:08:24]Scientists searched for this missing link of evolution for almost 40 years.

[00:08:29]It wasn't until May 2019 that gravitational wave detectors caught one of the most convincing signals, the GW190521 event.

[00:08:42]Okay. Yeah, they need a better name than that. Anyway, two black holes roughly 85 and 66 solar masses merge. Simple arithmetic would give you about 150 solar masses, but the final black hole was only about 142. The missing mass about eight suns worth was released as gravitational wave energy. So how did they appear if single stars didn't create them? One of the most plausible explanations is repeated mergers in extremely dense environments. In a crowded environment, ordinary stellar mass black holes can eventually collide and consume one another. It's a long process of cannibalism where they gradually gain mass crossing the forbidden zone step by step. But no matter how heavy they get in these clusters, their scale pales in comparison to the objects waiting for us next. Level four, super massive black holes. We're moving on to the true lords of the cosmos. A giant like this hides in the center of almost every large galaxy. Their masses start in the millions and can go well beyond billions of solar masses. In our home galaxy, the Milky Way, this gravitational anchor is named Sagittarius A star. Its mass is about 4 million suns. If you placed it where our star is, its event horizon would sit well within the orbit of Mercury. not so huge, right? But don't let that seemingly small size of its shadow fool you. Its gravity would completely rewrite and eventually destroy the entire architecture of our solar system. So, how do we know it's there if the center of the galaxy is hidden from us by dense clouds of dust?

[00:10:41]Well, the stars themselves give it away.

[00:10:44]For years, telescopes have tracked stars near the very center of our Milky Way, racing around an invisible object at insane speeds, up to 24 million km per hour. Such rapid orbits at such a short distance are possible in only one case.

[00:11:03]A colossal mass is hidden in the center.

[00:11:07]And in 2019, the Event Horizon Telescope project achieved the almost impossible.

[00:11:13]By linking radio telescopes across the globe into a single Earthsiz network, humanity saw for the very first time not the black hole itself, but its shadow in the center of the M87 galaxy. The famous image, a blurry, asymmetrical ring of fiery superheated plasma wrapping around an absolutely dark and impenetrable void. But a much deeper mystery hides here. Scientists have discovered a striking relationship. The mass of a super massive black hole is often linked to the mass of the central bulge of its host galaxy. In other words, the monster at the center and the galaxy around it seem to grow and evolve together.

[00:12:01]However, this connection is not perfect, and astrophysicists still debate who sets the rules in this partnership, the galaxy itself or the black hole at its center. Level five, ultra massive black holes. We're approaching the limit of the observable world. One of the most massive black hole candidates known to science is the monster powering the quazar to 618. Popular in scientific literature estimates its mass in the tens of billions of solar masses, often around 40 billion and higher. Although the exact mass depends heavily on the model used, the light from this leviathan has been traveling to us for over 10 billion years. We're seeing it as it was when the universe was only a few billion years old. A giant accretion disc spins around it. A whirlpool where gas accelerates, compresses, and heats up to extreme temperatures, gradually losing energy and falling closer and closer to the black hole. This process releases so much energy that the quazar shines hundreds of trillions of times brighter than the sun. Think about that.

[00:13:22]Can you even imagine something hundreds of trillions of times brighter than our sun? I didn't even think anything could get that bright in our universe, but apparently it can. Anyway, behind this almost impossibly bright light, the host galaxy is almost impossible to see. But the main problem with such giants is not only their size, it's how quickly they appeared. In physics, there's something called the Edington limit. A black hole cannot absorb matter infinitely fast. If it eats too quickly, the radiation from the superheated gas becomes so intense that it pushes incoming material away, thus creating a cosmic traffic jam. If the black hole in to 618 grew only the standard way, starting with the mass of a normal star and obeying this physical limit, it would have been extremely difficult for it to grow to such a size in the time available in the early universe. Therefore, scientists suggest that such objects were either originally born from giant seeds when entire clouds of pure gas collapsed directly, bypassing the star phase, or they grew through extremely rapid super Edington feeding in the chaos of the young universe. Amazing. Level six, stupendously large black holes. In astrophysics, these hypothetical monsters are sometimes called slabs, stupendously large black holes. I love that name. This is an entirely hypothetical class of objects whose mass starts at 100 billion solar masses and then goes up from there. Humanity has not yet discovered a single such object.

[00:15:14]So why do physicists even waste time discussing them then? Well, because science often finds answers on the fringes of the impossible. If such unimaginably huge giants truly existed somewhere in deep space, their presence could not be ignored. They would possess enough gravity to influence the movement of entire galaxy clusters. Let me repeat that. Not just galaxies, but entire galaxy clusters. Really cool if true. In some bold theoretical models, scientists suggest that such colossal objects hidden from us could explain a fraction of the dark matter in the universe. You know, that invisible substance which seems to make up most of the matter in our universe, but whose nature remains a mystery. However, it's important to remember this is not an observational fact yet. It is a speculative mathematical hypothesis with very strict constraints. If they do exist, their number must be highly limited. Overly massive or numerous objects would leave noticeable traces in cosmological observations, including the CMBB or cosmic microwave background.

[00:16:31]So, let us continue to peer into the dark. But for this final seventh level, we might never be able to see it. Well, at least not from the outside. Level seven, the cosmic horizon class. To comprehend this finale, we have to change our very understanding of what a black hole is. We're used to thinking of it as an object whose density seems to trend towards infinity. Remember the first level, the mass of a mountain within the volume of a proton. But the mathematics of the event horizon hides a paradox. The more massive an object becomes, the lower its average density.

[00:17:16]For sufficiently massive super massive black holes, the average density can't be comparable to the density of ordinary water. And a black hole the size of a solar system wouldn't be any denser than the air in the room you are currently sitting in. If you simply plug it into the Schwarz shield radius formula, the size of the event horizon, the result comes out strikingly close to the scale of our actual cosmos. And the average density of such a hypothetical object would match by order of magnitude the current density of our universe. right now. H very interesting here. Rigorous observational astrophysics ends and the territory of bold cosmological hypothesis begins.

[00:18:09]There are mathematical models in which our universe could have originated inside of a black hole located in some larger four-dimensional parent space.

[00:18:20]The equations of general relativity do indeed show an intriguing, almost frightening mathematical similarity between the geometry of gravitational collapse and the metric of our expanding cosmos. But we got to be careful here.

[00:18:38]This does not mean science has proven that our universe is inside or really is an ordinary black hole in some external superpace. This is a highly speculative idea, not a conclusion of the standard cosmological model. However, the striking coincidence of formulas and scales itself keeps physicists awake at night. It's a reason to ask the most uncomfortable questions about the nature of our reality.

[00:19:09]We started this journey with microscopic objects hiding in the quantum foam. And we end with the thought that the grandest structure in the universe might not be an object somewhere in space but the boundary of the universe itself from within which we are trying to understand reality. Write what you think about this in the comments. Always happy to have you come for a visit and see you next time. Bye-bye.