What If TON 618 Came Closer to Earth? (4K)

TON 618 is one of the most massive black holes ever found: 40–66 billion times the mass of the Sun, feeding a quasar that shines like 140 trillion Suns. It is 18 billion light-years away, and you will never see it. So we brought it closer, one step at a time, and watched what happens to our sky, and to Earth. At 898 million light-years it becomes a faint naked-eye star. At 1,000 light-years, night is gone. At 10 light-years, the oceans boil away. At 1 light-year it is 40,800 times brighter than the Sun. Then Earth stops, and a ship goes on alone: the last stable orbit, the photon sphere, where half the sky is black, and the event horizon. ⏱ CHAPTERS 0:00 Opening 0:15 898 million light-years 0:40 10 million light-years 0:59 How it got its name 1:18 Andromeda distance (2.5 million light-years) 1:37 LMC (160,000 light-years) 2:02 Centre of the Milky Way 2:28 1,000 light-years 2:52 200 light-years – two suns 3:14 100 light-years 3:42 10 light-years 4:10 Proxima Centauri distance 4:38 1 light-year 5:40 10,000 AU 6:10 Last stable orbit 6:45 Photon sphere 7:25 Event horizon 7:55 Back home 🔭 THE SCIENCE • Distance: "18 billion light-years" is TON 618's comoving distance (18.2 billion light-years), how far away it is today. The light we see left it about 10.8 billion years ago. • Mass: 40.7–66 billion solar masses. The distances in AU (last stable orbit 3,909 AU, photon sphere 1,954 AU, event horizon 1,303 AU) use 66 billion; for 40.7 billion, multiply them by 0.62. • Brightness: modelled with absolute magnitude −30.7 and a luminosity of 4×10⁴⁰ W (about 140 trillion Suns). • Temperatures (80 °C at 100 ly, ~850 °C at 10 ly, ~1,450 °C at Proxima's distance, ~3,300 °C at 1 ly) are Earth's equilibrium temperature with no greenhouse effect, so they are lower limits. • "The Sun's grip" (~1,000 AU at 100 ly, ~46 AU at 4.25 ly, ~11 AU at 1 ly) is the Sun's Hill radius against TON 618's tidal pull. • Shadow sizes (6° at 1 ly, 37° at 10,000 AU) and the time slowing at the photon sphere (1 hour there = 1 hour 44 minutes on Earth) are for an observer holding still at that distance. • TON 618 got its name in 1957: it is entry 618 in the Tonantzintla catalogue of faint blue stars, made at the Tonantzintla observatory in Mexico. It was later found to be a quasar. The black hole and space scenes are rendered in SpaceEngine; the Earth views are built from NASA maps; the city and landscape scenes are real footage composited with those renders. No AI-generated visuals. 🎞 CREDITS Renders: SpaceEngine. NASA Earth Observatory: Blue Marble Next Generation; Black Marble (NASA Earth Observatory/NOAA NGDC). Public domain. Footage: Pexels (Pexels License), videos 20530294, 31663374, 2472717, 3727447, 31873314, 12693832, 4991088, 38596587, 5539932, 11485363, 33637800, 8064422, 2055056, 4384529, 18657861, 35887000, 11553331, 5926176, 4165565, 11669489, 30591185, 10106267, 9994416. Thumbnail photo: Pexels photo 30362683 (Pexels License). Music: "Beyond These Walls" by Scott Buckley. www.scottbuckley.com.au, licensed under CC BY 4.0. 🔔 Subscribe to The Cosmic Witness for more space simulations built on real physics. 💬 At which distance would you have left Earth? Tell us in the comments. #TON618 #BlackHole #Quasar #Space