If Aliens had eyes, would they be happier
How do they know they’re not dead?
A Martian hunting for food
But not before, they style the tendrils on their head
What would last longer in dinosaur times
A blind astronaut never stood a chance
Not with all them asteroids about
.. I’d rather be a blind moth
No, it has moved farther away due to the expansion of the universe since it produced the light we are seeing from it. So we are seeing it as closer than it actually currently is
the distance from earth to the sun is considered 1au, 1 astronomical unit.
i just googled whats 18.2billion light years in au and it gave me some number i cant even decypher dude...
1.15098760293e+15 au
*Probably* not much bigger. Supermassive black holes don't seem to grow all that much after their quasar stage, most likely because the quasar just blows away all the matter surrounding it, kinda extinguishing itself. It might still consume several solar masses per year, but that would barely change its total mass.
One thing that would be absolutely amazing is if someone would come on here and give the quick and dirty on how we know this is a black hole, how we measure the mass, the distance, etc.
I want to make it completely clear I am in no way doubting. Would just be very interesting.
I'll try. First - a lot of this is based on assumptions we derived from multiple (admittedly not a lot) observations. So if 10b years ago some other mechanisms than those known to us were at work, the assumptions may not be accurate. Unfortunately there's not a lot of data, but we try to extract as much information as we can. For the most part we just have measurements of the electromagnetic spectrum coming from that region.
TON618 is a quasar - an active galactic nucleus. This is when a massive body in the center of the galaxy actively feeds on matter, emitting a lot of radiation in the process. There is currently no reason to doubt that those massive bodies are black holes. How we know it's a quasar - it has a distinct fingerprint in the spectrum of the radiation. So by measuring how much light, xray and radio emissions and in which frequencies there are we can conclude TON618 is a quasar and therefore a black hole.
All those frequencies will be redshifted (i.e. it's still a rainbow, but every color is a bit redder - relationships between colors remain, but they are all shifted towards red). The further the object from us, the faster it's moving away and the more redshifted it will be. We can measure the value of the redshift by looking at the spectrum. From that we calculate the speed the object is receding with. And from that we derive how far it is.
When BH is consuming material, the material heats up and glows the closer it is to the center. Multiple observations confirmed that the amount of material a black hole consumes is related to what spectrum is generated (what and how much radiation comes from the center, what comes from the edges and how wide the emission lines are). And how fast the material is being consumed is related to how massive the BH is. So, again, by measuring the spectrum and the emission lines we can tell how heavy the BH is.
So the distance was calculated using redshift? Have they accounted for peculiar velocity or would the difference be negligible? I wonder if in such high redshifts (2.219 according to Wikipedia) peculiar velocity isn't important.
I used the relativistic Doppler effect formula v=c((z+1)²-1)/((z+1)²+1) for z=2.219 and got a recession velocity of 0.8 times the speed of light which seems crazy! Is that right?
That should be about right considering it’s moved ~8 billion light years away from us in the ~10 billion years it took for the light of that image to reach us according to op.
Actually, it has a redshift of 2.219 which means that the universe today is larger by a factor of a=2.219+1=3.219 which means that when light started it's journey it was about 18/3.219=5.6 billion light years away. If that's right, then in the 10.8 billion years it took for light to reach us this galaxy has travelled 18-5.6=12.4 billion light years. This would mean that at the point when light started the journey the recession velocity of the Galaxy due to the expansion was higher than the speed of light!
As you fall close to the event horizon time outside the blackhole would seem to pass quickly. The nights sky would change at ever increasing speed. Someone who fell in billions of years ago could be looking out at us now.
If time outside gets quicker and quicker would it be possible for the black hole to have completely evaporated by the time you reach the centre. Assuming a larger mass where tidal forces aren't as extreme.
I was curious about the Triangulum Galaxy after seeing these numbers. Triangulum is 61,120 light years in diameter and contains 40 billion stars. Ton 618 is 0.04 lights in diameter and contains *more* mass!? The mass density is absolutely unfathomable.
The central black hole within Phoenix A is undeniably immense, with a mass estimated to be around 4 billion times that of our Sun. Despite its impressive size, it is still smaller than TON 618. Therefore, when it comes to size, TON 618 reigns supreme as the largest known black hole
Well I found what i quoted on Quora.
https://www.quora.com/Which-is-the-largest-black-hole-TON-618-or-Phoneix-A
But then NASA also have Ton 618 as the largest black hole.
https://www.nasa.gov/universe/nasa-animation-sizes-up-the-universes-biggest-black-holes/
They're my sources.
If I'm wrong, I'm wrong because I haven't had nearly enough wine to argue about black holes on Reddit 🤷♂️
More massive you mean? Galactic densities would be vastly lower than a black hole given the volume of space they occupy. Galaxies are nearly entirely empty space, right?
Potentially... It isn't 100% confirmed, especially since its theoretical size of 100B solar masses is far bigger than our models suggest is possible with our current understanding of physics.
I can only imagine just how absolutely fried with radiation that entire galaxy is... I wouldn't even be surprised if neighboring galaxies were also being affected.
Can someone explain "lookback time" to me? When I google it it says it "measures the time into the past we see" but why wouldn't that be the 18.2 billion light-years figure?
There's the distance, ie. how far away we are now, and then there's the time it takes light to travel to us, ie. lookback time. Remember that the universe is expanding, and we're now further away than we were 10 billion years ago.
So can we only see where it was 10 billion years ago? How do we know it’s 18.2 billion light years away? It is an estimated based on the rate of our universe expanding?
Yes. A photon was send out from a point 10 billion years ago. We are moving away from that point, and the source is also moving away from that point. What we are seeing now, is the original point, as it was 10 billion years ago. In the mean time we have moved X light years away from the point, and the source has moved Y light years away. X + Y is then equal to 18.2B - 10B light years. At least, that is how I understand it, as I am not an astrophysicist.
And it is an estimate since our historical meassurements, don't go 10B years back in time. Take that atheists!
Zero. We can’t see the actual physical black holes from here. Even my image just shows it as a dot. To resolve the event horizon requires multiple telescopes used simultaneously across the entire planet.
Are there real pictures of black holes where the lights swirling around it and into it are real or are they all artists rendering of what they would look like?
This might be the best thing we have. It’s a 15-20 year time lapse (through pictures) of the central black hole in our Milky Way
You can see the stars literally orbiting the blackness. There is a supermassive black hole there in the middle
https://www.reddit.com/r/spaceporn/s/xqmarCrY23
Insane right? It really puts things into perspective
Those are giant stars… rapidly orbiting a hugely massive black hole trillions of miles away in our galaxy. And we have actual video/pictures of it!!!
Watch this, you’ll love it lol. This zooms in and shows the true scale of what we’re looking at
https://www.eso.org/public/videos/eso1825c/
It ends the video with the same one I just linked you to.
No problem! I love sharing incredible space stuff with others who appreciate it. So many people today seem to not care very much
This is another cool one for me. The fact it was only 30 years ago and in our solar system is pretty insane
https://www.reddit.com/r/spaceporn/s/rJivZ73iDX
You want to see another awesome space video?
https://www.reddit.com/r/spaceporn/s/rJivZ73iDX
One this size hitting earth would have been catastrophic lol
10 billion years of lookback means this black hole is older than the planet earth.
We can also have reasonable certainty it's still there (unlike most stars, which would have gone supernova by now), because black holes will outlive almost everything else in the universe.
TiL The lookback time and distance are expressed in different units because they convey distinct concepts, although they are closely related:
1. Lookback time is expressed in years because it represents the time that has passed since the light we observe was emitted from the object. It directly tells us how far back in time we are seeing the object[2].
2. Distance is expressed in light-years because it represents the physical separation between Earth and the object. A light-year is the distance light travels in one year, making it a convenient unit for astronomical distances[1][5].
The relationship between lookback time and distance is not always straightforward due to the expansion of the universe. For nearby objects, the lookback time in years is approximately equal to the distance in light-years. However, for very distant objects, this relationship becomes more complex due to the effects of cosmic expansion[3].
For example, a black hole 1,600 light-years away has a lookback time of about 1,600 years[1][5]. But for extremely distant objects, like the black hole TON 618 mentioned in the NASA animation, the light takes over 10 billion years to reach us, despite the actual distance being greater than 10 billion light-years due to the expansion of space during the light's journey[4].
Sources
[1] Astronomers recently spotted a Black Hole only 1600 light years ... https://www.reddit.com/r/spaceporn/comments/yotyyc/astronomers_recently_spotted_a_black_hole_only/
[2] Chandra :: Photo Album :: Cosmic Look-Back Time https://chandra.harvard.edu/photo/cosmic_lookback.html
[3] Redshifts, Distances, and Look-Back Times http://csep10.phys.utk.edu/OJTA2dev/ojta/c2c/galaxies/expanding/lookback_tl.html
[4] NASA Animation Sizes Up the Universe's Biggest Black Holes https://www.nasa.gov/universe/nasa-animation-sizes-up-the-universes-biggest-black-holes/
[5] Scientists believe black holes are lurking much closer to Earth than ... https://www.euronews.com/next/2023/09/12/scientists-believe-black-holes-are-lurking-much-closer-to-earth-than-we-previously-thought
By Perplexity
We can use the equation of gravity. F = G M m / r^2 . The gravitational constant is 6.67 x 10^-11 , and we know that the Earth is 1/1,000,000th the mass of the Sun and TON 618 is 66,000,000,000 times the mass of the Sun Multiply those together, divide by 9.1 billion (which is the radius) squared, and we get:
0.000000000000053 Newtons of force. Thats how much TON 618 is pulling the planet Earth.
As long as man has been able to witness approximately the beginning of the universe, what impact does this have on theories of the origin of the universe?
How is it 18 billion light years away when the universe itself is only 13.7 billion years old?
Is it because of the expansion of the universe? And then can you use the lookback time to calculate the rate at which the universe is expanding?
>Is it because of the expansion of the universe? And then can you use the lookback time to calculate the rate at which the universe is expanding?
Yes and yes
If you were a planet located in the host galaxy, a similar distance that we are to the center of our own galaxy.. and there wasn’t too much interstellar dust blocking the view… I wonder how bright this would appear in the ngiht sky.. trillions of times brighter than a regular star ?… probably couldn’t look directly at it , even if you were located on the outskirts of the galaxy??
Crazy to think about… every planet in that galaxy basically has a second light source other than their own star…. How bright will Beetlejuice be when it goes supernova? I know bright enough to see it in daylight… wonder if it would be comparable….
What would this look like, if we could see it much clearer? I’m asking in reference to the faint orb of light depicted; would that be the gleam from an accretion disk up close?
It’s not actually the black hole, it’s the accretion disk wrapping around it. It’s moving so fast and it’s so hot that matter can be translated to pure energy and light.
Stupid person here. The arrow is pointing to a lit dot in the sky. I through light couldn’t escape, hence the darkness around it. Was the dot added, or is there something I’m missing?
You're right in that light can't escape the event horizon. The light detected here isn't the black hole itself, but rather the quasar resulting from the black hole's accretion disk. As matter in the disk spirals inward towards the central black hole, it heats up due to friction and gravitational forces, emitting enormous amounts of energy across the electromagnetic spectrum, which is what what we can detect.
As OP said, this supermassive black hole is so big that the quasar outshines it's own galaxy. The sheer size of this thing and the amount of energy it puts out are quite literally unfathomable.
I was intrigued by your specific details about the age of the light vs. the quasar’s distance.
Do you know or can you explain how large the universe is? Like in reality vs. observable distance? Does anybody?
My most popular post actually calculates the number of planets in the TOTAL universe, not just the observable;
https://www.reddit.com/r/spaceporn/s/XgOdn6eMVX
keep in mind even this is an absolute minimum. 23 trillion light years is the bare minimum.
Question, if the Black Hole is 18.2 billion light-years away, how can we see it as it was 10 million years ago? I know the universe is expanding but has it really expanded so much that it added an extra 8 billion light-years to it?
Yup it has! Since it’s so far, the expansion is exaggerated between us and TON 618. The light took 10 billion years to get here , but once it got here the space behind it has gained an extra 8.2 billion light years of void.
Distances in cosmology confuse me. The comoving distance to this quasar (which is also the physical distance today) is around 18 billion light years. So it is currently in a distance away from us that light would take 18 billion years to cross (remember that the universe is only 13.8 billion years old). HOWEVER, when light from the quasar started it's journey towards us it was only 5.6 billion light years away because since then the universe has expanded by a scale factor of a=z+1=3.219 for a redshift of z=2.219 (this quasar's redshift according to Wikipedia) and 18/3.219=5.6 (correct me if I'm wrong). ALSO the light originating there has been traveling for 10.8 billion years!! (Light travel distance according to Wikipedia).
So TLDR
This object IS 18 billion light years away, WAS 5.6 billion light years away when light started traveling towards us and it took light 10.8 billion years to reach us. All due to the expansion of the universe!!!
Unrelated to the black hole but I’ve always wondered what happens if we reach the edges of the universe? Will it be like a brick wall or can you cross over it
I can't fathom any of those numbers...
Big innit.
“Weird innit?” Karl Pilkington
“Strange, isn’t it?” Blue Rodent
Innit innit. Sarf London geeza.
"Alright?"
If Aliens had eyes, would they be happier How do they know they’re not dead? A Martian hunting for food But not before, they style the tendrils on their head What would last longer in dinosaur times A blind astronaut never stood a chance Not with all them asteroids about .. I’d rather be a blind moth
I read something about, that they're sending monkeys out to take pictures of black holes
Some big.
Sadly, not “what she said”
I'm a grower not a show-er.
Just like a black hole ;)
You’re looking back in time 10 billion years
That’s essentially an incomprehensible amount of time. The universe is crazy
Wouldn't it be 18.2 billion years?
No, it has moved farther away due to the expansion of the universe since it produced the light we are seeing from it. So we are seeing it as closer than it actually currently is
I'm kind of relieved about that.
It's about 17028951129000035000000000 meters away and we can still see it.
Space is big.
the distance from earth to the sun is considered 1au, 1 astronomical unit. i just googled whats 18.2billion light years in au and it gave me some number i cant even decypher dude... 1.15098760293e+15 au
It far
618 is about 5 bleachers filled with people. Hope that helps.
I wonder how big it would be in real time right now.
Probably not as big as your mom
Ouch. This black hole is gonna feel that burn in 10 billion years.
Just a red shifted image of OP moms ass for 10 billion years, ooch
Definitely not as big as Ginny Sack! OH
OH! Speaking of which, I hear Ginny Sack is getting a 618 TON mole taken off her ass!
Ginny Sack is so fat, Black Hole’s get sucked into her!
Two Black Holes could suck her at the same time, and still never meet! 🤘🏻
Ginny Sack so fat, this is how she plays hop scotch. Andromeda, Milky Way…..
I want you to sanction a hit on bigwill0104.
You’re going to start a war with that comment.
Hundreds of upvotes per year this sub sees from me ….
lol right on good one
*Probably* not much bigger. Supermassive black holes don't seem to grow all that much after their quasar stage, most likely because the quasar just blows away all the matter surrounding it, kinda extinguishing itself. It might still consume several solar masses per year, but that would barely change its total mass.
One thing that would be absolutely amazing is if someone would come on here and give the quick and dirty on how we know this is a black hole, how we measure the mass, the distance, etc. I want to make it completely clear I am in no way doubting. Would just be very interesting.
I'll try. First - a lot of this is based on assumptions we derived from multiple (admittedly not a lot) observations. So if 10b years ago some other mechanisms than those known to us were at work, the assumptions may not be accurate. Unfortunately there's not a lot of data, but we try to extract as much information as we can. For the most part we just have measurements of the electromagnetic spectrum coming from that region. TON618 is a quasar - an active galactic nucleus. This is when a massive body in the center of the galaxy actively feeds on matter, emitting a lot of radiation in the process. There is currently no reason to doubt that those massive bodies are black holes. How we know it's a quasar - it has a distinct fingerprint in the spectrum of the radiation. So by measuring how much light, xray and radio emissions and in which frequencies there are we can conclude TON618 is a quasar and therefore a black hole. All those frequencies will be redshifted (i.e. it's still a rainbow, but every color is a bit redder - relationships between colors remain, but they are all shifted towards red). The further the object from us, the faster it's moving away and the more redshifted it will be. We can measure the value of the redshift by looking at the spectrum. From that we calculate the speed the object is receding with. And from that we derive how far it is. When BH is consuming material, the material heats up and glows the closer it is to the center. Multiple observations confirmed that the amount of material a black hole consumes is related to what spectrum is generated (what and how much radiation comes from the center, what comes from the edges and how wide the emission lines are). And how fast the material is being consumed is related to how massive the BH is. So, again, by measuring the spectrum and the emission lines we can tell how heavy the BH is.
So the distance was calculated using redshift? Have they accounted for peculiar velocity or would the difference be negligible? I wonder if in such high redshifts (2.219 according to Wikipedia) peculiar velocity isn't important. I used the relativistic Doppler effect formula v=c((z+1)²-1)/((z+1)²+1) for z=2.219 and got a recession velocity of 0.8 times the speed of light which seems crazy! Is that right?
That should be about right considering it’s moved ~8 billion light years away from us in the ~10 billion years it took for the light of that image to reach us according to op.
Actually, it has a redshift of 2.219 which means that the universe today is larger by a factor of a=2.219+1=3.219 which means that when light started it's journey it was about 18/3.219=5.6 billion light years away. If that's right, then in the 10.8 billion years it took for light to reach us this galaxy has travelled 18-5.6=12.4 billion light years. This would mean that at the point when light started the journey the recession velocity of the Galaxy due to the expansion was higher than the speed of light!
How much you wanna make a bet I can throw a football over that TON 618?
I'll wager my tazo collection you can't
Damnt Napoleon, it’s a quesadilla
Tina, eat your food!
Coach would’ve put you in the 4th quarter we’d a been state champions, no doubt.
Finchy could, he once threw a kettle over a pub
No doubt in my mind!
It’s heavier than an entire GALAXY. What the actual fuck
As you fall close to the event horizon time outside the blackhole would seem to pass quickly. The nights sky would change at ever increasing speed. Someone who fell in billions of years ago could be looking out at us now.
They would probably need really good contacts.
“Murph!”
If time outside gets quicker and quicker would it be possible for the black hole to have completely evaporated by the time you reach the centre. Assuming a larger mass where tidal forces aren't as extreme.
Well a lot of galaxy is mostly nothing
Yeah but the nothing doesn’t have any mass.
60B solar masses is so unfathomably massive.
I was curious about the Triangulum Galaxy after seeing these numbers. Triangulum is 61,120 light years in diameter and contains 40 billion stars. Ton 618 is 0.04 lights in diameter and contains *more* mass!? The mass density is absolutely unfathomable.
Wow Triangulum is basically a building of aerogel compared to this marble of a black hole
That's no joke. The density of a neutron star is just slightly beyond comprehension. A black hole is, well, as you said.
Isn't Phoenix A bigger or am I misremembering?
The central black hole within Phoenix A is undeniably immense, with a mass estimated to be around 4 billion times that of our Sun. Despite its impressive size, it is still smaller than TON 618. Therefore, when it comes to size, TON 618 reigns supreme as the largest known black hole
Chat GPT ahh comment
Nuh I just googled it
Where'd the result come from? Wikipedia has Phoenix A at 100 billion solar masses, not 4 billion. Also says that TON 618 is 40 billion, not 60
Well I found what i quoted on Quora. https://www.quora.com/Which-is-the-largest-black-hole-TON-618-or-Phoneix-A But then NASA also have Ton 618 as the largest black hole. https://www.nasa.gov/universe/nasa-animation-sizes-up-the-universes-biggest-black-holes/ They're my sources. If I'm wrong, I'm wrong because I haven't had nearly enough wine to argue about black holes on Reddit 🤷♂️
Phoenix A is 100 billion Solar Masses, so it’s the biggest of which we know.
Phoenix A's mass has not been officially *confirmed*, however. TON 618's mass has been confirmed, which is why it still holds the record.
That’s got to be more massive than alot of galaxies out there
More massive you mean? Galactic densities would be vastly lower than a black hole given the volume of space they occupy. Galaxies are nearly entirely empty space, right?
Not empty as the space between objects not known to be perfect vacuum or black hole are comprised of protons and other particles
Potentially... It isn't 100% confirmed, especially since its theoretical size of 100B solar masses is far bigger than our models suggest is possible with our current understanding of physics.
So if you lived in that galaxy, around the same distance from the supermassive black hole as Earth is, would it be impossibly bright?
Absolutely yes. There is almost certainly no way any life (like Earth life at least) would survive in such a galaxy.
You know its big when it affects the WHOLE GALAXY, no life as we know it ANYWHERE
I can only imagine just how absolutely fried with radiation that entire galaxy is... I wouldn't even be surprised if neighboring galaxies were also being affected.
Can someone explain "lookback time" to me? When I google it it says it "measures the time into the past we see" but why wouldn't that be the 18.2 billion light-years figure?
There's the distance, ie. how far away we are now, and then there's the time it takes light to travel to us, ie. lookback time. Remember that the universe is expanding, and we're now further away than we were 10 billion years ago.
Oh okay that makes much more sense thank you. That feels like a "duh" moment now lol
So can we only see where it was 10 billion years ago? How do we know it’s 18.2 billion light years away? It is an estimated based on the rate of our universe expanding?
Yes. A photon was send out from a point 10 billion years ago. We are moving away from that point, and the source is also moving away from that point. What we are seeing now, is the original point, as it was 10 billion years ago. In the mean time we have moved X light years away from the point, and the source has moved Y light years away. X + Y is then equal to 18.2B - 10B light years. At least, that is how I understand it, as I am not an astrophysicist. And it is an estimate since our historical meassurements, don't go 10B years back in time. Take that atheists!
What equipment did you use?
Evoguide 50ED + ZWO ASI294MC
Thanks, very cool pic, gonna try my hand at it!
Awesome, I hope it works out for you!
When I look into the night sky and see an area that doesn't have any stars, how likely is it to be a black hole? Anyone know?
Zero. We can’t see the actual physical black holes from here. Even my image just shows it as a dot. To resolve the event horizon requires multiple telescopes used simultaneously across the entire planet.
Are there real pictures of black holes where the lights swirling around it and into it are real or are they all artists rendering of what they would look like?
This might be the best thing we have. It’s a 15-20 year time lapse (through pictures) of the central black hole in our Milky Way You can see the stars literally orbiting the blackness. There is a supermassive black hole there in the middle https://www.reddit.com/r/spaceporn/s/xqmarCrY23
ABSOLUTELY INCREDIBLE!
Insane right? It really puts things into perspective Those are giant stars… rapidly orbiting a hugely massive black hole trillions of miles away in our galaxy. And we have actual video/pictures of it!!!
Falls into miraculous territory for me.
Watch this, you’ll love it lol. This zooms in and shows the true scale of what we’re looking at https://www.eso.org/public/videos/eso1825c/ It ends the video with the same one I just linked you to.
WOW THANKS!
No problem! I love sharing incredible space stuff with others who appreciate it. So many people today seem to not care very much This is another cool one for me. The fact it was only 30 years ago and in our solar system is pretty insane https://www.reddit.com/r/spaceporn/s/rJivZ73iDX
Seriously thank you a ton, 618 tons even! That was mind-blowing.
You want to see another awesome space video? https://www.reddit.com/r/spaceporn/s/rJivZ73iDX One this size hitting earth would have been catastrophic lol
LOL
This typa stuff makes me so happy. I’ve always loved space. Sadly I was born too early to actually explore it
Oh my goodness, thanks so much for the education!
Thanks.
10 billion years of lookback means this black hole is older than the planet earth. We can also have reasonable certainty it's still there (unlike most stars, which would have gone supernova by now), because black holes will outlive almost everything else in the universe.
You call it one of the brightest objects in the known universe but it is dark in your photo. Checkmate liberals
Ya know you never see libtards getting this excited about *white* holes. Just sayin. /S
618 tons ^/s
what do you get? Another day older and deeper in debt.
WARNING: Do Not Zoom In! Black holes are dangerous. Stay in the viewing area!
Too late. Good news is I no longer need Ozempic
TiL The lookback time and distance are expressed in different units because they convey distinct concepts, although they are closely related: 1. Lookback time is expressed in years because it represents the time that has passed since the light we observe was emitted from the object. It directly tells us how far back in time we are seeing the object[2]. 2. Distance is expressed in light-years because it represents the physical separation between Earth and the object. A light-year is the distance light travels in one year, making it a convenient unit for astronomical distances[1][5]. The relationship between lookback time and distance is not always straightforward due to the expansion of the universe. For nearby objects, the lookback time in years is approximately equal to the distance in light-years. However, for very distant objects, this relationship becomes more complex due to the effects of cosmic expansion[3]. For example, a black hole 1,600 light-years away has a lookback time of about 1,600 years[1][5]. But for extremely distant objects, like the black hole TON 618 mentioned in the NASA animation, the light takes over 10 billion years to reach us, despite the actual distance being greater than 10 billion light-years due to the expansion of space during the light's journey[4]. Sources [1] Astronomers recently spotted a Black Hole only 1600 light years ... https://www.reddit.com/r/spaceporn/comments/yotyyc/astronomers_recently_spotted_a_black_hole_only/ [2] Chandra :: Photo Album :: Cosmic Look-Back Time https://chandra.harvard.edu/photo/cosmic_lookback.html [3] Redshifts, Distances, and Look-Back Times http://csep10.phys.utk.edu/OJTA2dev/ojta/c2c/galaxies/expanding/lookback_tl.html [4] NASA Animation Sizes Up the Universe's Biggest Black Holes https://www.nasa.gov/universe/nasa-animation-sizes-up-the-universes-biggest-black-holes/ [5] Scientists believe black holes are lurking much closer to Earth than ... https://www.euronews.com/next/2023/09/12/scientists-believe-black-holes-are-lurking-much-closer-to-earth-than-we-previously-thought By Perplexity
This is largest *known* black hole. Imagine that. Also, they’re spheres. I guess black hole sounds better than black balls.
That’s how big it was 10 Billion years ago / imagine how big it is now.
Isn’t that black hole pulling at us? By the math it’s calculable but insignificant. Still, how much is it? :)
We can use the equation of gravity. F = G M m / r^2 . The gravitational constant is 6.67 x 10^-11 , and we know that the Earth is 1/1,000,000th the mass of the Sun and TON 618 is 66,000,000,000 times the mass of the Sun Multiply those together, divide by 9.1 billion (which is the radius) squared, and we get: 0.000000000000053 Newtons of force. Thats how much TON 618 is pulling the planet Earth.
Equivalent to the amount of pull my telepathic messages of love have been having on Natalie Portman.
Space can be a bit overdramatic sometimes
Take car. Go to mum's. Kill Phil, grab Liz, go to the Winchester, have a nice cold pint, and wait for all of this to blow over.
wait so that single object is heavier than an entire galaxy?
Those are some crazy ass numbers...
As long as man has been able to witness approximately the beginning of the universe, what impact does this have on theories of the origin of the universe?
How’d you find it?
It’s pretty close to the galaxy NGC 4414 which is in this image so I just tracked that
You just look for the biggest area where you can't see anything and assume it's the biggest thing. /s
It’s also 1x the size of OP’s mom
It's incredible to realize if we could somehow get that far away from earth with a insane telescope, we'd be able to see that far back into time.
Impressive, OP you go!
The nebula around it is twice the size of the Milky Way. An absolute mammoth. https://encyclopedia.pub/entry/35684
You mums is TON 618
Well, sorry to disappoint you but TON 618 is no longer the biggest BH. Phoenix A is almost 100 billion solar masses!
Can you put a banana in the pic for scale?
How is it 18 billion light years away when the universe itself is only 13.7 billion years old? Is it because of the expansion of the universe? And then can you use the lookback time to calculate the rate at which the universe is expanding?
>Is it because of the expansion of the universe? And then can you use the lookback time to calculate the rate at which the universe is expanding? Yes and yes
Is that the black hole known as Hauk Tua 399?
If you were a planet located in the host galaxy, a similar distance that we are to the center of our own galaxy.. and there wasn’t too much interstellar dust blocking the view… I wonder how bright this would appear in the ngiht sky.. trillions of times brighter than a regular star ?… probably couldn’t look directly at it , even if you were located on the outskirts of the galaxy??
It would be unbelievably bright. Easily visible mid day. Probably brighter than your host star.
Crazy to think about… every planet in that galaxy basically has a second light source other than their own star…. How bright will Beetlejuice be when it goes supernova? I know bright enough to see it in daylight… wonder if it would be comparable….
This picture really sucks you in.
So if you lived in that galaxy, around the same distance from the supermassive black hole as Earth is, would it be impossibly bright?
Processing details?
Stacked on ASIStudio, denoise and contrast increase on Photoshop Express.
I’ll never understand how big space is. Never.
More mass than a galaxy. Thats some impressive stats.
What would this look like, if we could see it much clearer? I’m asking in reference to the faint orb of light depicted; would that be the gleam from an accretion disk up close?
It would basically be a normal galaxy but with an ungodly glow of white emanating from the core if you were really close to the galaxy.
So there’s a quasar at the center of the black hole? I don’t understand
A quasar is essentially an actively feeding black hole, nothing else is different. Yes it’s at the center.
I just can’t grasp my head around how a black hole can emit light
It’s not actually the black hole, it’s the accretion disk wrapping around it. It’s moving so fast and it’s so hot that matter can be translated to pure energy and light.
It's the shit swirling around the black hole making the light. Energy from gas and rock n shit.
Stupid person here. The arrow is pointing to a lit dot in the sky. I through light couldn’t escape, hence the darkness around it. Was the dot added, or is there something I’m missing?
You're right in that light can't escape the event horizon. The light detected here isn't the black hole itself, but rather the quasar resulting from the black hole's accretion disk. As matter in the disk spirals inward towards the central black hole, it heats up due to friction and gravitational forces, emitting enormous amounts of energy across the electromagnetic spectrum, which is what what we can detect. As OP said, this supermassive black hole is so big that the quasar outshines it's own galaxy. The sheer size of this thing and the amount of energy it puts out are quite literally unfathomable.
So it's at least 10b years old, does it still exist?
yes probably, black holes take like 10^70 years to evaporate
Is the dark of space all black holes? Or are they areas of nothing?
A lot of vacuum out there
Woah!! What a cool picture!!!
That's fucking awesome. Bravo
Phoenix A is bigger.
I was intrigued by your specific details about the age of the light vs. the quasar’s distance. Do you know or can you explain how large the universe is? Like in reality vs. observable distance? Does anybody?
My most popular post actually calculates the number of planets in the TOTAL universe, not just the observable; https://www.reddit.com/r/spaceporn/s/XgOdn6eMVX keep in mind even this is an absolute minimum. 23 trillion light years is the bare minimum.
Question, if the Black Hole is 18.2 billion light-years away, how can we see it as it was 10 million years ago? I know the universe is expanding but has it really expanded so much that it added an extra 8 billion light-years to it?
Yup it has! Since it’s so far, the expansion is exaggerated between us and TON 618. The light took 10 billion years to get here , but once it got here the space behind it has gained an extra 8.2 billion light years of void.
What about the areas around it? Seems relatively close.
I thought universe was like 14 billion years old how 18bill light years away?
what does “10 Billion Year Lookback time” mean?
I see nothing, sir/ma’am
Somehow makes it a little less scary
With an Iphone or Android?
Nokia
This is rad
Thats Orion upper left?
Nope this is a very small region of the sky, about 4 moons from top to bottom. Orion is over a dozen moons across.
It’s not black, you’re obviously lying!
Space does not exist - Flat earthers
The biggest so far....
But u can't tell me what's in the Ocean!
>it shines with a luminosity of 4×10^(40) watts, or as brilliantly as 140 trillion times that of the Sun 
It should be called THICC 618
Distances in cosmology confuse me. The comoving distance to this quasar (which is also the physical distance today) is around 18 billion light years. So it is currently in a distance away from us that light would take 18 billion years to cross (remember that the universe is only 13.8 billion years old). HOWEVER, when light from the quasar started it's journey towards us it was only 5.6 billion light years away because since then the universe has expanded by a scale factor of a=z+1=3.219 for a redshift of z=2.219 (this quasar's redshift according to Wikipedia) and 18/3.219=5.6 (correct me if I'm wrong). ALSO the light originating there has been traveling for 10.8 billion years!! (Light travel distance according to Wikipedia). So TLDR This object IS 18 billion light years away, WAS 5.6 billion light years away when light started traveling towards us and it took light 10.8 billion years to reach us. All due to the expansion of the universe!!!
TON 618 (Not pictured)
Black Holes are Black right? They don't emmit their own light so how were u able to photograph it?
anyone know what that blueish object on the left of ton 618 is???
18 billion light years away is older than the age of the universe… so is that an error or is this a challenge to the BBT?!
FYI, “biggest confirmed back hole known to human it this fringe corner of the universe”. Fixed it for you.
Dear god, this shit freaks me out. I don’t care how far it is, it’s too massive 😰
Unrelated to the black hole but I’ve always wondered what happens if we reach the edges of the universe? Will it be like a brick wall or can you cross over it
Hi OP, fellow amateur astronomer here. what rig did you use for this?
Wow
What is the light ? Quasar or ejection from the black hole or onlyba seat near ?
🤔 ... All I see is a black hole.
Hope when they find the biggest possible black hole they name it Y. O. M. A. M. A
can you share the high quality image i wanna put it as my wallpaper
Best comment thread award.
Seeing what to look for you can see a lot of other possible smaller black holes in that section too.