What is the approximate mass of Sagittarius A*, the Milky Way’s central black hole?
Answer
4 million solar masses
80 Black Holes And The Universe Trivia Questions with Answers
80 public questions with answers, drawn from the well. How many can you answer?
What is the approximate diameter of the observable universe?
Answer
93 billion light-years
Which theorem states that the total area of a black hole’s event horizon cannot decrease?
Answer
Black hole area theorem
What is the approximate mass of the supermassive black hole M87*?
Answer
6.5 billion solar masses
What is the name of the NASA space telescope launched in December 2021 that studies early galaxies and black holes?
Answer
James Webb Space Telescope
What term describes the dark central region seen in the Event Horizon Telescope image of M87*?
Answer
Black-hole shadow
Which galaxy is expected to collide and merge with the Milky Way in about 4.5 billion years?
Answer
Andromeda Galaxy
What is the approximate age of the universe according to modern cosmological measurements?
Answer
13.8 billion years
What is the name of the proposed maximum mass limit for a stable neutron star?
Answer
Tolman–Oppenheimer–Volkoff limit
Which physicist calculated the maximum mass of a stable white dwarf, now called the Chandrasekhar limit?
Answer
Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar
Which NASA space telescope launched in 1990 transformed observations of distant galaxies and black holes?
Answer
Hubble Space Telescope
What is the name of the hypothetical radiation emitted by black holes because of quantum effects?
Answer
Hawking radiation
What is the name of the 1915 theory that explains gravity as curved spacetime around black holes?
Answer
General relativity
Which physicist predicted black holes could slowly lose mass through quantum effects?
Answer
Stephen Hawking
Which galaxy contains the supermassive black hole Sagittarius A*?
Answer
Milky Way
What is the name of the bright ring of hot plasma surrounding some black holes?
Answer
Accretion disk
What type of black hole may have formed from density fluctuations in the early universe?
Answer
Primordial black hole
What phenomenon makes a black hole bend and magnify light from a more distant object?
Answer
Gravitational lensing
What name is given to the first generation of stars formed from pristine gas in the early universe?
Answer
Population III stars
What is the name of the mathematical spacetime solution for a charged, nonrotating black hole?
Answer
Reissner–Nordström metric
What type of black-hole merger produces a damped gravitational-wave signal called ringdown after the collision?
Answer
Binary black-hole merger
What is the name of the formula linking a black hole’s entropy to the area of its event horizon?
Answer
Bekenstein–Hawking formula
What is the name of the hypothetical middle-weight class of black holes between stellar and supermassive black holes?
Answer
Intermediate-mass black hole
Who proposed the Penrose process for extracting energy from a rotating black hole?
Answer
Roger Penrose
What process describes a star being torn apart when it passes too close to a supermassive black hole?
Answer
Tidal disruption event
What is the name of the theoretical problem about whether information is destroyed inside evaporating black holes?
Answer
Black hole information paradox