Astronomy Picture Of The Day: TON 618—the behemoth black hole that's rewriting the rules of cosmic enormity!

 

#NASA, #Space, #astronomy, #διάστημα

Black Hole

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Lurking in the abyssal depths of space, behold TON 618—the behemoth black hole that's rewriting the rules of cosmic enormity! Clocking in at a jaw-dropping 66 billion times the mass of our Sun, this gravitational Goliath is so immense that its event horizon sprawls across 390 billion kilometers, dwarfing Pluto's orbit like a speck in the void. Light itself bows before it, trapped in an eternal dance on the brink!Nestled over 10 billion light-years from Earth, TON 618 hails from the universe's wild infancy, a time of frenzied galaxy births and voracious feasts. Scientists reckon it ballooned into this unrivaled titan by smashing together supermassive black holes and gobbling up stars, gas, and dust across eons—a relentless predator sculpting the cosmos!Imagine scaling up Earth's sunny orbit a millionfold: that's the shadowy maw of TON 618, a haunting whisper of the mind-bending scale that rules our infinite playground. Credit: NASA / Astrophysical Journal Archives, observational data on quasar TON 618