Thanks to data from various space telescopes, the oldest black hole ever seen has been discovered: TON 618. All the details
TON 618 is a giant black hole located 10.4 billion light-years away in the direction of the constellation of the hunting dogs. He owns one really huge mass, estimated at 66 billion times that of the Sunis therefore equal to 1.32 x 10^41 kg. Just over a 1 followed by 41 zeros of Kg… try to write it and understand what it is about. A mind-boggling number! It was discovered for the first time in 1957 but at that time it was not yet known what a . Only in the early 1970s, through more precise radio observations, did astronomers discover the true nature of this enormous object.
What is a Quasar?
Quasars are highly energetic manifestations in the nuclei of some galaxies, which are believed to be powered by the accretion of gas on supermassive black holes (with a minimum mass greater than hundreds of thousands of times that of the Sun) placed at their center. Such monsters are estimated to swallow the mass equivalent of hundreds of planet Earths per minute! These supermassive black holes form and grow mainly during galaxy mergers. When two galaxies of comparable mass merge, their central black holes merge and a small percentage of their gas is accumulated by the new black hole through the formation of an accretion disk, all over a time scale of about 10 millions of years.
Nothing is created, nothing is destroyed, everything is transformed
The conversion of its gravitational energy into thermal energy, combined with large frictions, causes enormous heating of the gas, up to hundreds of thousands of degrees. The acceleration of gas to relativistic speeds, thermal emission and other mechanisms (such as sicrotron and inverse Compton processes, in the radio and gamma bands respectively) fyear so that a fraction of the mass increased (up to values of the order of 10%) is emitted in the form of radiation, reaching enormous luminosities, up to a million billion suns! The name quasar was initially given because these objects were discovered as powerful radio sources, while optically they had a point-like appearance like a star, resulting in the appearance of “quasi-stellar” object, i.e. objects very similar to very distant stars, albeit with anomalous radio emission. From the contraction of this expression, the name “quasar” was born.
Read more:
