Posts

Showing posts from December, 2023

The Sun

Image
The sun is an ordinary  star , one of about 100 billion in our   galaxy , the Milky Way. The sun has extremely important influences on our planet: It drives weather, ocean currents, seasons, and  climate , and makes plant life possible through  photosynthesis . Without the sun’s heat and light, life on Earth would not exist. The Sun moves around the Galactic Center  of the Milky Way , at a distance of 26,660 light years . From Earth, it is  about 8 light minutes  away. It’s diameter  is about 109 times that of Earth . It’s mass  is about 330,000 times that of Earth, making up about 99.86% of the total mass of the Solar System.  Roughly three-quarters of the Sun's mass  consists of hydrogen (~73%); the rest is mostly helium (~25%), with much smaller quantities of heavier elements, including oxygen , carbon , neon , and iron . The sun was born about 4.6 billion years ago. Many scientists think the sun and the rest of the solar system ...

TON 618

Image
Tonantzintla 618  is a supermassive black hole located in the constellation of Canes Venatici and Coma Berenices. It’s around 18.2 billion light years from Earth and mass of 66 billion solar masses.  TON 618 has a radius of over 1,000 astronomical units (AU), which means that if the black hole was placed in the center of the solar system , by the time you reached Pluto, you would be less than 5% of the way from the center of the black hole to its edge.  TON 618 powers a quasar, one of the brightest objects in the entire universe with the illuminating power of 140 trillion suns. Quasars draw light from the gravitational energy of the central hole.   Due to the brilliance of the central quasar, the surrounding galaxy is outshone by it and hence is not visible from Earth. Astronomers first spotted it in a 1957 survey from the Tonantzintla Observatory in Mexico but didn’t realize what it was. They first thought it was a faint blue star, but observations a decade later re...