Originally posted by curiousrb
A black hole has been found that is 17 BILLION times larger than our sun!
This is possibly one of the biggest black holes ever to be observed.
Black hole
You did not say what the source said when you
stated "17 BILLION times larger than our sun", so please be careful or you may get a response like this:
www.abovetopsecret.com...
Since the rant has already been ranted in that link, I won't repeat it here.
Sometimes the media screws it up, but in this case the media actually got it right.
How much larger it is than the sun depends on what you mean by larger. Most people think of physical dimensions when you say larger, like height width
length type of concept.
I had to do some calculations to figure out how much larger than the sun it is because I didn't see any sources stating that. Here is how much larger
it is in physical dimensions:
The event horizon radius is 72,000 times greater than the sun's radius.
This means the volume of the event horizon is 373 trillion times greater than the volume of the sun (which is nowhere near 17 billion, and this is
what I'd infer when someone says "larger" without any qualification).
The 17 billion reference is comparing mass, not size.
I did a few more comparisons. If the Earth was a black hole, it would be roughly the size of a peanut.
In contrast, the event horizon of this black hole is about 330 times the average radius of the Earth's orbit.
So yeah, it's freaking huge any way you look at it.
edit on 30-11-2012 by Arbitrageur because: clarification