- How huge are supermassive black holes?
- Watch NASA’s impressive animation
Black holes are the “hungriest inhabitants” of the universe. They swallow stars and entire galaxies, but for now we are safe from them. Fortunately, this also applies to the monster TON 618. NASA scientists estimate its mass at an incredible 66 billion times the mass of the Sun.
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TON-618 is fig
For astronomers, the discovery of black holes is not unusual. You can say that this is their daily bread. However, in 1957, researchers from Mexico’s Tonantzintla Observatory discovered the largest black hole in the universe. At first they didn’t realize what they were actually looking at. They thought it was a faintly glowing blue star, but further observations ten years later showed that they had spotted intense radiation from material falling into the supermassive black hole.
The monster TON 618 is located about 18.2 billion light-years from Earth. It is hidden on the border between the constellations Canes Venatici and Coma Berenices. The Schwarzschild radius of TON 618 corresponds to more than 1,300 AU (an astronomical unit of length approximately equal to the average distance of the Earth from the Sun). To give an idea, the distance of Pluto from the Sun corresponds to about 40 astronomical units.
A gigantic black hole would thus swallow the solar system like nothing. Fortunately, he is very far away and cannot threaten us. The more massive the black hole, the larger the so-called Schwartzschild radius defined by the event horizon. If the black hole were, for example, the Sun, its Schwartzschild radius would correspond to less than three kilometers.
Black holes fascinate scientists
TON 618 is powered by a quasar, one of the brightest objects in the entire universe, shining as brightly as 140 trillion suns. Quasars draw their light from the gravitational energy of their black hole. The material surrounding the black hole falls in, compressing and heating up as it does so, releasing huge amounts of radiation. Individual cosmic events, such as the most powerful supernovae, can overshadow quasars for a short time, but they only last a few weeks. In contrast, quasars glow for millions of years.
An impressive NASA animation shows the size of some supermassive black holes in the known universe. In the video, for example, we can see a dwarf galaxy called J1601+3113, which hosts a black hole with a mass of approximately 100,000 solar masses. There is also the well-known supermassive black hole Sagittarius A*, which is supposed to have a mass of about 4 million Suns. We can also see M87, the first black hole ever photographed by scientists, which has a mass of about 5.37 billion Suns. And then there is the TON 618…
Preview photo credit: Aman Pal/Unsplash, credit: Live Science, IFLScience
