TON 618 (abbreviation of Tonantzintla 618) is a hyperluminous, broad-emission-line, radio-loud quasar, and Lyman-alpha blob located near the border of the constellations Canes Venatici and Coma Berenices, with the projected comoving distance of approximately 18.2 billion light-years from Earth.[a] It contains one of the most massive black holes ever found, at roughly 40.7 billion times the Sun's mass though some older, more frequently-cited estimates yield 66 billion
Object Type: A radio-loud quasar (an active galactic nucleus) housing an ultramassive black hole at its core.
• Distance: Located approximately 18.2 billion light-years from Earth in a comoving distance measurement, with its light taking about 10.8 billion years to reach us.
• Brightness: Shines with the brilliance of roughly 140 trillion suns, making it one of the brightest objects in the known universe.
• Size: Its event horizon (the boundary from which nothing can escape) is immense, spanning hundreds of billions of miles across—large enough to swallow our entire solar system with room to spare.
Discovery: First recorded in 1957 during a photographic survey from the Tonantzintla Observatory in Mexico. Image Credit Sloan Digital Sky Survey, Apache Point Observatory, Astrophysical Research Consortium
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