Oscar Pascual Bakker

As some of you correctly pointed out, the claim that TON 618 is the largest object in the Universe is now outdated. Recent discoveries have identified Phoenix A, a supermassive black hole with an estimated mass of around 100 billion suns—or possibly even more, as its exact mass has not yet been measured using orbital methods. Phoenix A resides at the center of the Phoenix Cluster of galaxies and boasts some truly mind-boggling features: - Mass: 24,100 times greater than Sagittarius A*, the black hole at the center of the Milky Way. - Scale: Twice the mass of the entire Triangulum Galaxy, including its dark matter halo. - Event Horizon: A Schwarzschild diameter of 590.5 billion kilometers (3,900 AU), roughly 100 times the distance from the Sun to Pluto. - Circumference: Traveling around its event horizon at the speed of light would take 71 days and 14 hours. - Growth: Gains about 60 times the mass of the Sun every year. Given its immense size, Phoenix A might belong to a proposed class of stupendously large black holes —primordial black holes with masses potentially exceeding 100 billion solar masses. Such objects push the boundaries of what we understand about the formation and evolution of black holes, far surpassing the theoretical mass limits of luminous, accreting black holes in spiral galaxies.