Every Type Of Black Hole Explained in 11 Minutes

Planck black hole. This is the smallest black hole physics allows to exist. It is so small that a single proton looks like Jupiter by comparison. Its temperature? 10 quadrillion times hotter than the core of the sun. That makes it the hottest anything in the universe can physically be. But what's even crazier is its lifespan. Let's take the shortest-lived creature on Earth, the mayfly. It lives for approximately 24 hours. The Planck black hole makes it look immortal. It makes the mayfly look like it has been alive since the dinosaurs. Think about it this way. A lamp turns on across the room. Before that light even reaches your eyes, trillions upon trillions of Planck black holes could have already formed and vanished. It blinks into existence, and it is gone before the concept of time itself even begins to feel meaningful. The Planck black hole disappears almost instantly. But the next one on this list, it may have survived since the beginning of time itself. Primordial black hole. In the first fraction of a second after the Big Bang, before any star, galaxy, or planet existed, the universe was an unimaginably dense ocean of energy. In some regions, that energy became so concentrated that space-time collapsed in on itself, forming primordial black holes. Some of them are less than half a millimeter across, roughly the size of a single grain of sand. A primordial black hole that size would weigh as much as Mount Everest, an entire mountain, compressed into something small enough to get stuck beneath your fingernail. Unlike the Planck black hole, which vanished almost instantly, a primordial black hole could still be alive today. So far, every object on this list needed matter to form. The next one changes that completely. Because under the right conditions, even the light illuminating the room around you could collapse into a black hole. Kugelblitz. A kugelblitz is a black hole made entirely from light. Not a dead star. Not crushed matter. Just pure light compressed so intensely a black hole forms anyway. And according to Einstein's theory of relativity, this should actually be possible. The universe does not care where the energy comes from. Which led to an uncomfortable question. What if humanity accidentally created a black hole of its own? Micro black hole. Before the Large Hadron Collider switched on in 2008, a small number of physicists raised a concern. At the energies being generated, they feared the collider might accidentally create a micro black hole. The scientists running the Large Hadron Collider were not worried. Any micro black hole created at those energies would be smaller than a proton and evaporate almost instantly through Hawking radiation. And they had a good reason not to worry. Every single day, cosmic rays strike Earth's atmosphere with energies far greater than anything the LHC can produce. If micro black holes could form and consume matter, nature would already have created them billions of times over. Earth would not still be here. The micro black hole is harmless. The next one on this list is not. In fact, if it appeared close enough to Earth, you would never finish watching this video. Stellar Mass Black Hole A star dozens of times more massive than our sun burns through its fuel over millions of years. And when that fuel finally runs out, the core collapses in less than a second, faster than the human nervous system can register pain. The outer layers explode outward in a supernova. What remains is a stellar mass black hole. Dozens of suns, compressed into something smaller than Manhattan. But what happens at the edge of an object so dense that not even light can escape it? If someone watched you fall toward the black hole, they would never actually see you enter it. You would appear to slow down, freeze at the edge, and slowly fade into darkness. But from your perspective, you would keep falling normally. You would feel nothing unusual as you crossed the boundary. You would simply be inside. No way out. No way to tell anyone. But what happens when a star gets too close to a black hole? X-ray Binary Black Hole A stellar black hole becomes dramatically more dangerous when it drifts too close to another star. Its gravity begins tearing gas from the star's surface, dragging it into a spiraling disk of superheated plasma millions of degrees hot. That disk blazes with X-rays powerful enough to be detected across the galaxy. These violent systems are known as X-ray binaries. The most famous is Cygnus X-1, around 7,200 light-years from Earth, where an invisible black hole is slowly consuming a companion star until the entire star is gone. That is happening in our galaxy right now. But not every black hole stays attached to a star. The next one could drift through our own solar system, and we might not notice it until it was already too late. Rogue Black Hole Some black holes are violently thrown out into deep space the moment they are born. A supernova explosion can push harder in one direction than the other, launching the newborn black hole across the galaxy at millions of kilometers per hour. No star. No light. No warning. Just an invisible stellar-mass black hole, drifting silently through the Milky Way. These are known as rogue black holes, and there could be millions of them wandering our galaxy right now. Most remain completely invisible. We only notice them when they briefly pass in front of a distant star, warping its light before vanishing back into the darkness. In 2022, astronomers confirmed the first definitive detection of one just 5,000 light-years from Earth. It had likely been drifting silently through space for millions of years without knowing it was there. But sometimes, two black holes cross paths, and when they finally collide, the violence is almost impossible to comprehend. Binary Black Hole When two black holes become trapped around each other, they slowly begin spiraling inward. As they orbit, they release gravitational waves, ripples spreading through spacetime itself. In the final moments before collision, they are orbiting each other hundreds of times every second at more than half the speed of light. When they finally collide, the merger releases more energy in a fraction of a second than every star in the observable universe combined. In 2015, scientists detected the first confirmed gravitational waves from one of these collisions using the LIGO Observatory. The signal came from two black holes merging 1.3 billion light-years away. Yet by the time the wave reached Earth, it moved our detector by less than the width of an atom. We detected one of the most violent events in the universe through a distortion smaller than anything human beings can see. And despite all that violence, these black holes are still tiny compared to what comes next. Intermediate Black Hole Somewhere between ordinary stellar black holes and the largest black holes in the universe, there appears to be a missing category. Objects too massive to form from a single collapsing star, yet far smaller than the cosmic giants discovered elsewhere in space. We call them intermediate black holes. And despite decades of searching, we have found only a handful of possible examples. Scientists believe they may form inside dense star clusters, where repeated collisions slowly build something larger and larger over time. Intermediate black holes may be the first step toward objects so large they can swallow entire solar systems. Supermassive Black Hole At the center of almost every galaxy in the universe sits a supermassive black hole. Buried at the heart of the Milky Way is Sagittarius A star, a black hole containing 4 million times the mass of our sun. From Earth, its event horizon would appear no larger than a tennis ball sitting on the moon. And yet every star you can see in the night sky is orbiting it, including us. Right now, the entire solar system is moving around Sagittarius A star at more than 200 kmol per second. One full orbit takes 230 million years. The last time our solar system completed one orbit around the Milky Way, dinosaurs did not yet exist. In 2022, scientists captured the first direct image of it, a glowing ring of superheated gas surrounding a perfectly dark center where light itself disappears. But Sagittarius A star is quiet, dormant like a lion sleeping at the center of the galaxy. But eventually, even giants begin to feed again. Quasar Feed a supermassive black hole enough material, and the entire galaxy around it begins to disappear in the glare. The disk of gas spiraling into the black hole heats to such extreme temperatures that it can outshine every star in its galaxy combined. These objects are called quasars, and they are the brightest sustained objects in the observable universe. The most powerful known quasar is consuming the equivalent of an entire sun every single day. The jets erupting from its poles travel across millions of light-years. Most quasars belong to the early universe, when galaxies were younger, denser, and far more violent than they are today. But some of them are still out there. And if you've made it this far into the universe's worst nightmares, drop a like and subscribe. Because the next object on this list turns a quasar into something capable of wiping out life on Earth without warning. Blazer A blazer forms when one of a quasar's relativistic jets happens to point directly at Earth. Most known blazars are safely far away. But if one formed within a few thousand light-years of Earth, the results would be catastrophic. The radiation would begin stripping away our ozone layer almost immediately, exposing the surface of the planet to lethal cosmic radiation. No warning possible. The jet moves at the speed of light. The first sign of its arrival would be the damage already beginning. Entire ecosystems would collapse beneath an invisible beam crossing the galaxy from millions of light-years away. And somehow, even blazars are still not the largest things on this list. Ultramassive Black Hole Some black holes became so large that astronomers had to create an entirely new category for them. Ultramassive black holes exceed 10 billion times the mass of our sun. The most famous is TON618, a black hole so enormous that if it replaced our sun, its event horizon would swallow every planet in the solar system and extend billions of kilometers beyond Pluto. Every world you have ever known would already be trapped inside the boundary where nothing can escape. TON618's gravitational influence stretches across hundreds of thousands of light-years, and even objects like this may not be close to the largest black holes the universe can produce. Slab Stupendously large black hole, also known as slab, are hypothetical black holes exceeding 100 trillion times the mass of our sun. Objects so extreme that their event horizons could be larger than the observable regions between entire galaxy clusters. Light traveling from one side of a slab to the other would take longer than the current age of the universe to complete the journey. At that scale, the black hole stops feeling like an object and starts feeling like part of the structure of the universe itself. We do not know if slabs truly exist, but mathematics does not forbid them. Somewhere in the dark spaces between galaxies, there could be black holes so large that human intuition completely fails to process them. Every black hole on this list has one thing in common. There is always a boundary hiding whatever is inside. The final object on this list has no boundary at all. Naked singularity Every black hole on this list hides something at its center, a point where gravity becomes so extreme that our understanding of physics completely breaks down. Normally, that region is sealed away behind the event horizon, hidden from the rest of the universe forever. Physicist Roger Penrose argued that this is not an accident. He proposed that the universe itself prevents these broken regions from ever being exposed. But according to the same mathematics that predicts black holes, there may be a way around that rule. If a black hole spins fast enough, the event horizon could theoretically disappear entirely, leaving the center exposed to the universe. A naked singularity A place where space, time, and physics stop behaving normally with nothing covering it anymore. We have never confirmed one exists. Most physicists suspect some unknown process always prevents them from forming. But nobody has ever proven that. Which means somewhere in the universe, there could be a place where the laws of physics are visibly broken, open to space, with nothing hiding it from the rest of reality.