Discover TON 618

About TON 618

.

One of the largest black holes to be ever discovered, TON 618 stands at a whopping 66 billion solar masses(one solar mass= mass of the sun)! This black hole is the “engine” of a quasar (an extremely luminous active galactic centre/nucleus) and feeds on intensely hot gas and matter orbiting around its accretion disk.

(Artistic depictions)

TON 618

The light from this quasar is believed to have travelled atleast 10 billion light years, i.e, the quasar and black hole are roughly 10 billion years old. The Schwarzchild radius (the radius to which an object must be compressed to form a black hole) of the black hole is roughly 40 times the distance from the Sun to Neptune, or 1300 AU(Astronomical Units).

For comparison, the Schwarzschild radius of the Earth itself is approximately 9 millimetres, or a little larger than the diameter of a penny.

(Artistic depiction)

Features

The black hole estimatedly feeds on material with a mass equivalent to the sun every day, and its event horizon is speculated to be large enough to engulf the entire solar system. Perhaps one of the brightest objects to be discovered in the universe, the quasar in which the black hole lies shines around 140 trillion times brighter than the sun.