As a quasar, TON 618 is believed to be the active galactic nucleus at the center of a galaxy, the engine of which is a supermassive black hole feeding on intensely hot gas and matter in an accretion disc. The light originating from the quasar is estimated to be 10.8 billion years old.
The enormous black hole is also twice the size of the milky way. It is also is as bright as 140 trillion Suns.
Located at a distance of approximately 18.2 billion light-years from Earth, TON 618 can be found near the intersection of the Canes Venatici and Coma Berenices constellations.
With such high mass, TON 618 may fall into a proposed new classification of ultramassive black holes. A black hole of this mass has a Schwarzschild radius of 1,300 AU (about 390 billion km or 0.04 ly in diameter) which is more than 40 times the distance from Neptune to the Sun.
