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Growth of Massive Black Holes

Black holes may sound like dangerous and frightening things to the casual observer, but in reality they are distant and harmless objects. Your family van may be cluttered with junk, but it has far too little mass to collapse into a black hole under normal conditions. If for some reason it did collapse, the minivan-black hole's radius would only be 2.5 x 10-25 km - much smaller than a virus!

Imagine the Universe is a service of the High Energy Astrophysics Science Archive Research Center (HEASARC), Dr. Nicholas White (Director), within the Laboratory for High Energy Astrophysics at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.

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Project Leader: Dr. Jim Lochner
All material on this site has been created and updated between 1997-2004.

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