Comparing the Milky Way to TON 618, one of the largest known black holes: watch the video

A movie of terrifying proportions: the dimensions of the black hole TON 618 compared to our Milky Way galaxy

It is 10.4 billion light years away from us Terrain the direction of the constellation Hounds. This is where Black hole To the center of the quasar tons 618Its mass is estimated at 66 billion times insole.

Let’s do the math:

• The mass of the Sun is 2 x 10^30 kg;
• The mass of 618 tons is 1.32 x 10^41 kg.

Just over 1 followed by 41 zeros! Try to write it down and understand what it is about. Amazing number! And in the following video, you can find it compared with our Milky Way Galaxy.

To learn more, watch the magnitude of the stars in an exciting video

What is a quasar?

They are very vital features in the nuclei of some galaxies, which are believed to be fed by the accumulation of gas on their surfaces. Supermassive black holes (with a minimum mass several hundred thousand times greater than that of the Sun) placed at its center. It is estimated that such monsters swallow the equivalent of hundreds of planet Earth’s masses per minute! these Supermassive black holes They form and grow mainly during galaxy mergers. When two galaxies with similar masses merge, their central black holes merge and a small percentage of their gas is accreted by the new black hole by forming an accretion disk, all over a time period of about 10 million years.

A million suns

During this time, the conversion of gravitational energy into thermal energy, combined with significant friction, heats the gas tremendously, by hundreds of thousands of degrees. Acceleration of the gas to relativistic velocities, thermal emission and other mechanisms (such as cyclotron and inverse Compton processes, respectively in the radio and gamma bands) ensure that part of the increased mass (up to values ​​of the order 10%) is emitted in the form of radiation reaching a colossal brightness of up to a million A billion suns!

Cover image credits Global Data (YouTube)

sources: Kaufman et al.; for me. no. A. Astron. Soc.311, 576±588 (2000). Massaro et al. 2009; Astronomy and Astrophysics, Volume 495, Issue 2, 2009, Pages 691-696

If the work we do seems useful to you, to you and to everyone, you can also decide to participate in it Subscribe to Passione Astronomia. We can promise you that with your help there will be more and more content to follow and understand the universe better. Thanks for your continued support!