Space: TON 618, 40 Billion Times Larger Than the Sun, is the Biggest Known Black Hole.

SPACE — Black holes are very mysterious objects in the universe. Scientists are constantly researching to uncover the mysteries of black holes.

Black holes are some of the most massive single objects in space. But, how big is the largest black hole that can be detected by humans?

It turns out that there is a theoretical limit to the size of a black hole. Reported from Live science, a black hole is a very massive celestial body. Not even light can escape it.

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The largest directly observed black hole with confirmed mass is named TON 618. This monster weighs approximately 40 billion solar masses. Wow!

TON 618 has a radius of just over 1,000 astronomical units (AU). One AU is the distance from Earth to the Sun. The TON radius of 618 means that if the black hole were placed at the center of the solar system, by the time you reach Pluto you will be less than 5 percent of its distance. Hugh.

TON 618 is located about 18.2 billion light years from Earth. In the night sky, this black hole is on the border between the constellations Canes Venatici and Coma Berenices.

Astronomers first spotted this black hole monster in a 1957 survey from the Tonantzintla Observatory in Mexico. At first scientists didn’t realize what it was.

At first scientists thought it was a dim blue star. However, observations a decade later revealed that astronomers had caught glimpses of the intense radiation from matter falling into the giant black hole. That radiation is called a quasar.

TON 618 powers quasars, one of the brightest objects in the entire universe with the illumination power of 140 trillion suns. Quasars draw light from the black hole’s central gravitational energy. Matter around the black hole falls. At that time, matter condenses and heats up, releasing large amounts of radiation.

Quasars are so distant that they appear only as faint points of visible light even in the most powerful telescopes. Astronomers first detected this quasar through its strong radio emission.

How do scientists determine the size of a black hole?

Supermassive black holes become massive through combinations of mergers with other black holes and are constantly eating matter around them. It is this rate of ‘eating’ that determines the size limit of a black hole.

Astronomers can estimate the maximum mass of a black hole by taking that ‘feeding rate’ and multiplying it by the known age of the universe. From the calculations can give an estimate of the maximum mass of about 40 billion solar masses.