I photographed TON 618 – a black hole 66 billion times the mass of our Sun, 10.4 billion light years away

by FakeRaveX

20 Comments

  1. That’s nice. What’s the brightest object in view in the centre left? Are things that appear brighter larger = closer?

  2. Man, 10 billion light years is just an unfathomable distance, like what you’re observing was there 10 billion years ago and we have no idea what it looks like right now

    And it took us what, 6 days travel to reach the Moon again and it’s right there in the sky.

    I love space, but it scares me how insignificant we are 😂

  3. Bobby_The_Kidd on

    Wow! What did you use to photograph it? I assumed objects that far away wpuld require like telescopes as large as Hubble or something

  4. MarsMaterial on

    TON 618 is such an interesting object. A black hole so monstrous that you could theoretically see the event horizon with the naked eye from multiple light years away. So colossal that if you fell past the event horizon it would take over a week to reach the singularity. An event horizon that extends further than the distance from here to Voyager 1. And every 5 millimeters or so of that vast Schwarzschild radius represents the mass of the entire Earth.

    And it’s real. So real that you just photographed it. And it’s so intense that you were able to do so from 10 billion light years away, a distance so absurd that this light is more than twice as old as the planet under your feet.

    It blows my mind to think about it.

  5. MsuProdigy69_ on

    Shouldn’t we be able to see the pulses of light coming out of it at the poles due to it being a quasar?

  6. I always find it fascinating, that they know, that bright dot in that picture with 100 other bright dots, is a black hole, and not a star.

  7. Would it be possible to even know what it is without knowing what it is?

    It looks like a just a another star. 

  8. I am not very knowledgeable about astronomy, could someone explain how we know that dot is not another star?

    In my mind, it seems like it’s so far away, how can we even begin to determine that it’s not an actual star.

    Astronomy is wild.

  9. rosy_drunkenness on

    That’s not actually TON 618 in the image, mate. That faint smudge is just the host galaxy, the black hole itself is invisible. You’re looking at billions of years of light travel time compressed into a tiny box.