Just How Many Black Holes Are There in the Universe?

And it’s an absolutely staggering number.

Transcript

00:00Black holes might be difficult to detect since we can't directly see them, but we're getting

00:07better at it.

00:08And recently astronomers were able to capture this image, where every little white dot in

00:12this photo is a black hole.

00:14Pretty cool.

00:15But this is just a small portion of the sky, and after crunching some numbers, scientists

00:19say they have a pretty good estimate of just how many black holes there are in the universe.

00:23According to researchers from the International School of Advanced Studies in Italy, there

00:27are likely 40 quintillion, or this many, black holes in the universe.

00:31They say this is the most exhaustive ab initio, or from the beginning, computational approaches

00:36to black hole estimations ever done.

00:38According to Science Alert, the researchers used data from black holes that formed from

00:42single or binary stars, and those that were the outcome of black hole mergers.

00:46This data helped them to come up with the birth rate of stellar mass black holes, or

00:50those that are between 5 and 160 times the mass of our own sun.

00:54And when compared to observational data we have on black holes, specifically their gravitational

00:58wave data, it checks out.

01:00So while we still don't know a whole lot about these dark cosmic objects, at least

01:03we're now getting a better idea of just how pervasive they are.