Our home, Earth the only place known to harbor life. As it stands,
across the observable universe, it seems we are the only beings capable of giving it meaning.
And so as the Singaporean adventurer Khoo Swee Chiow once said.
To see beyond the horizon, we must paddle out,
leave our familiar shores, and venture into the unknown.
That ghostly band of light and gas is where the centre of the Milky Way Galaxy lurks,
the home of the supermassive black hole, Sagittarius a star.
But the black hole we are attempting to find isn't in this Galaxy, it is not even in our
local group. The monster we are hunting is roughly 18.2 billion lightyears away.
To get there we must push beyond the realms of possibility and break the
cosmic speed limit, we must travel faster than anything has ever travelled before.
As we leave the stars of the Milky Way behind, we enter a void of darkness, intergalactic space.
But just as the feeling of being lost starts to take over,
distant points of light begin to emerge. Like diamonds raining down from the sky.
These are not stars, but entire galaxies containing billions of stars,
planets and moons. Possibly even life.
But we are not on the hunt for other beings like us, our destination is
something far more terrifying, and it's home is within that bright point straight ahead.
This is the quasar Tonantzintla 618, more commonly known as Ton 618. And at its
centre is one of the largest objects ever discovered. An ultra-massive black hole.
Black holes are some of the most massive single objects in space, and this is one
of the biggest currently known to exist. It is roughly 40 billion times the mass of the Sun,
but some older estimates put it at 66 billion times the mass of the Sun.
If we could place it in our solar system,
it would engulf the orbits of every planet, the Kuiper belt, and far beyond.
In fact, it is greater than the mass of every star combined in our
neighbouring Galaxy, the Large Magellanic Cloud.
This is one of the largest single bodies in the universe.
And Ton 618 hasn't finished growing yet, All that material circling it
is slowly being consumed, and as it does so it compresses and heats up,
releasing enormous amounts of radiation that is blasting out into space.
This is the engine of the quasar, this ultra-massive black hole is what powers it,
causing one of the brightest objects in the universe with
the illuminating power of 140 trillion Suns.
How Ton 618 became so big is a mystery, but it was likely from merging with other black
holes and continuously devouring the material that surrounds it.
As we continue to orbit this behemoth, we are slowly drifting closer to its event horizon,
the boundary at which if we cross, we can never return, not even light can escape this point.
Beyond the event horizon is where the monster lurks,
the inner region of the black hole, the chaotic heart of the quasar, called the singularity,
the single point in space where the mass of the black hole is concentrated.
Where all conceptions of time and space completely break down.
Now we have made it to the end of our journey, and just like all the material that has crossed the
event horizon, we too must follow, there's no turning back now, we've come too far.