Hacker News Reader

Comment by behnamoh | Hacker News Reader

My jaw (and my phone) dropped when I read the numbers. I feel like space is ruthlessly huge and these pulsars are brutally massive..

View on HN

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/TON_618

This black hole is 66 billion solar masses. Its mass is greater than that of our entire galaxy. The quasar shines with the power of 140 trillion suns. The event horizon radius is times 40 times the distance from Neptune to the Sun. Matter is getting sucked into it at 7000km/s

This is why we need to develop very precise warp drive exit techniques. Don’t want to exit warp inside the horizon.

Traveling through hyperspace ain't like dusting crops, kid.

TON 618 is a quasar, which according to Wikipedia "is an extremely luminous active galactic nucleus (AGN), powered by a supermassive black hole, with mass ranging from millions to tens of billions of solar masses"

"More than a million quasars have been found".

Wild.

As with most amazing space-related things, Anton Petrov has a wonderful video talking about TON 618, using Universe Sandbox (which is quite fun to play in!) to demonstrate its size in comparison to our solar system. It helps, to an extent, to visualize just how large it is.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vn9Xuema8q4

Small nit: I think the Wikipedia entry is saying TON 618's mass is greater than all of the stars in our galaxy (6*10^10 solar masses, according to the article), not greater than the entire mass of the galaxy (~10^12 solar masses, according to the Milky Way article).

It's interesting how we talk about these far off things using the present tense, because technically we should replace every use of "is" in your post with "was".

True. In the case of that monster, unless it ran out of galaxies to eat, it's still there nomming. Perhaps the only thing that has changed is the size of it.

Additionally, I love the challenge to language. These stars _are_ massive... but also tiny. Compare their 24 km radius to the 600,000 km radius of the sun. One of these objects would sit comfortably inside many Earth cities.

... at least for a milisecond before destroying it.

Now imagine that 24km object, something three times bigger than the biggest mountain on Earth, spinning 44 times a second!!! Of course, we can't even begin to imagine that this huge mountain also has the mass of the whole Earth, let alone the mass of the whole solar system (it's actually even more than that).

Just completely mind blowing.

If you see "massive" in reference to an astronomical object, it usually means "having a lot of mass" rather than "being very big".

Not always of course, and the latter usage is more likely in less specialized news sources.

And the energy lost between Sum and Earth due to gravity waves is sufficient to power a small toaster oven.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com