Numbers, please! TON 618: Huge black hole with 66 billion solar masses
TON 618 is a quasar containing a black hole of truly gigantic dimensions. Pretty much everything about it is worthy of superlatives.
Black holes are among the most fascinating objects in the cosmos. The mere fact that they can bend light rays and even spacetime due to their mass stretches the human imagination to its limits.
When, as in the case of TON 618, a quasar with a gigantic black hole at its center, enormous dimensions are added that make even the solar system look small, the imagination is stretched even further.
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In 1957, when the 0.7 Schmidt telescope at the Tonantzintla Observatory in Mexico (located about 11 kilometers west of Puebla and 33 kilometers east of the Popocatépetl volcano) was observing the sky in the constellation of the Hunting Dogs, a faintly shimmering blue-violet object stood out on the photographic plates. Astronomers Braulio Iriarte and Enrique Chavira were looking for white dwarf stars and considered their discovery to be a pale blue star and entered it in the Tonantzintla catalogue as object 618—hence the name TON 618.
Quasars were only defined later
The properties of quasars were still unknown at the time, and it was only in 1963 that the Dutch astronomer Maarten Schmidt defined them as “quasi star-like radio sources.” They are considered to be the most distant observable objects that can be observed due to their enormous luminosity, providing valuable insights for research into the early days of the universe. They are defined as the nuclei of galaxies that emit a lot of energy over a large wavelength range—and not only via radio waves.
In 1970, a radio wave study revealed that TON 618 is also a quasar. At its core is a supermassive black hole. The light of the associated galaxy is outshone by the quasar, so that the galaxy itself is not visible from Earth.
(Image:Â CC BY 4.0, Sloan Digital Sky Survey, Apache Point Observatory, Astrophysical Research Consortium)
The distance is also enormous: the light from TON 618 has traveled a distance of 10.4 billion years to reach Earth. The quasar therefore provides a glimpse into the early days of our universe. The absolute brightness of -30.7 mag corresponds to 140 trillion times the luminosity of the sun, making TON 618 one of the most luminous objects in existence.
Enormously large black hole
The data of the black hole are no less dizzying: the Schwarzschild radius of TON 617 has a distance of around 1300 astronomical units, or over 194 billion kilometers. An astronomical unit is the distance from the Earth to the Sun and is 150 million kilometers.
The mass is estimated at 66 billion solar masses. By comparison, Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way, has a mass of 4.15 million solar masses and a Schwarzschild radius of around 12 million kilometres.
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This also earned TON 618 an entry in the Guinness Book of Records. According to the latest findings, the black hole in the Phoenix Cluster could dispute this title. Researchers estimate Phoenix A to have up to 100 billion solar masses.
For a long time, black holes could only be measured theoretically, but since 2019 the merger of global telescopes to form the Event Horizon Telescope has been fascinating with images of the black holes in M87 and Sagittaurus A*, which will probably only remain a pipe dream due to the distance of TON 618.
(mawi)
