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Black holes are some of the most extreme astronomical
objects out there.
They’re dense enough to pack the mass of
the Earth into the size of a marble.
And at the heart of each one is a point of infinite
density where space and time cease to exist.
But even among these extreme objects, there
are extraordinary ones.
We’re talking black holes that grow larger, consume more, and spin faster than the rest.
By finding and studying these outliers, astronomers
get a glimpse of physics at its limits.
Here are three of the most intense black holes
helping them do just that.
The most massive black hole astronomers have
directly measured
is located 825 million light-years away 
in the galaxy Holm 15A.
It weighs in at around 40 billion solar masses.
But it didn’t start out that big.
To reach its mass, it had to consume almost
all the matter around it,
leaving basically a ghost town around its galaxy’s center.
According to a study submitted to The Astrophysical
Journal in July 2019,
this likely happened when two black holes merged.
As they danced around each other, whatever matter they didn’t devour got ejected out of the region.
Now, while this whopper holds the current
record,
pinning the blue ribbon on the most massive black hole isn’t an easy job.
Since black holes swallow up light, we can’t
directly see them,
which means astronomers have to get creative about their measurements.
They got this one’s mass by looking at how
its gravity pulls on nearby stars.
But they can also use less direct methods to gauge
the mass of a black hole,
like looking at the spectral lines, or chemical fingerprints, in the light surrounding it.
The shape of those lines can tell them how fast the source of that light is moving.
This method is less precise,
but scientists used it to measure one black hole that might be around 66 billion solar masses.
And another
could be as much as 100 billion!
It’s hard to say for sure how accurate these
measurements are.
But regardless of whoever ends up with the crown,
all of these objects will help astronomers figure out if there’s an ultimate mass black holes can achieve.
Because we’re not actually sure about that.
This next type of extreme black hole consumes
an enormous amount of matter.
Most supermassive black holes, including the
one at the center of our own galaxy,
are kind of… lazy.
The occasional morsel might fall
to its doom,
but for the most part, stuff orbits far enough away that they barely eat anything.
There’s a small group of them, though, the
literal 1%, that astronomers call active,
meaning they’re constantly gobbling up matter
around them.
We find this type of black hole in a region
called an Active Galactic Nucleus, or AGN.
The AGN contains the black hole, its accretion
disk, and the surrounding donut of dust and gas.
As these black holes devour matter, the AGN
emits light,
in some cases, outshining all the stars in the galaxy.
The hungriest black hole ever detected fuels
an AGN around 12 billion light-years away,
in one of the oldest galaxies we can detect.
It devours a mass equivalent to our Sun every two Earth-days, and it shines as bright as 700 trillion Suns.
For comparison, if this thing were at the
center of the Milky Way,
we could see it as a pinprick of light shining 10 times brighter than a full Moon.
And that’s about twice as luminous as typical
AGN!
This discovery was so surprising that the
team of astronomers that found it
had to check the brightness they detected wasn’t exaggerated by any other phenomenon.
For example, many AGNs have bright jets of particles streaming out of either side.
But follow-up research suggested no jets,
and nothing else that could be boosting the signal.
So it looks like this AGN is just naturally
brilliant.
The third extreme black hole is the fastest
spinner.
That prize goes to the black hole known as, well, this, and it’s located in our very own Milky Way.
Black holes spin because of a principle called
conservation of angular momentum.
You’ve seen that principle in action if you’ve
ever watched an ice skater spin faster as
they pull their arms closer to their body.
A similar thing happens with black holes.
Most black holes start out as the collapsed
cores of massive stars.
Those stars have some small amount of spin, and as the center collapses into a black hole, that spin gets faster.
Except, with black holes, there’s a little catch: 
For a given mass, there’s a maximum speed.
If a black hole has too much spin,
it will actually release some of the energy in its system until it slows down to below that limit.
So rather than saying that a black hole rotates
however many times a second,
astronomers assign it a so-called “spin parameter.”
That gives its speed as a percent of how fast it physically could spin.
The current prize-holder, as of January 2019, is rotating at between 92 and 95% of its speed limit.
So, it might not be the fastest-spinning
black hole ever,
but so far, it’s the one spinning closest to its physical limit.
Astronomers can’t measure a spinning black
hole itself, of course.
So they rely on clues in the light around it.
But actually measuring a black hole’s spin
is actually pretty complicated,
since there’s a lot of light interfering with the signal.
As a result, astronomers only have accurate measurements for half a dozen black holes
with really high spin parameters.
Meaning, again, this title could be up for
grabs.
But as our technology improves and we find
new record-setters,
these extreme black holes will keep giving us ways to test our predictions about the limits of physics
and reality as we know it.
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