And it’s an absolutely staggering number.
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LearningTranscript
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.