This is a reply to a friend asking about the picture of a black hole that was published this week...... The black hole is so far away that it would take something traveling at the speed of light (186,000 miles a second), 55 million years to reach it....The mass of the black hole is equal to 6 and a half billion of our sun's mass added together......A black hole is created when a sun explodes and goes supernova, when this happens most of the mass of the sun is blasted into space to provide the seeds of new suns, but a void is left behind containing super dense matter, matter so dense that even light cannot escape (thus the term black hole). These black holes can be created anywhere in a galaxy, but over time they all will migrate inward along the spiral arms until they reaches and merge with the supermassive black hole which is at the center of most galaxies.