Ape with Skull 2025 & 2040. I’m grateful to Hugo Rheinhold (1853-1900) for his clever original sculpture, and @WarrenFahy for the inspiration that it might be a good time for an update.
"Surely, I have not wronged you, nor have I met you," Holmes said. "Therefore, you must know me from accounts you have read, in the broadsheets, I imagine. Perhaps you harbour a childish grudge against my successes, my man, having made embarrassing mistakes in your own life that make you doubly despise the spectacle of a confident intellect. This is a capital mistake, worse than any and possibly leading to all the others you may have made. For no intellect is infallible. Indeed, lad, mistakes are the chief stock in trade of the successful mind, and from this one, mine has already profited, as should yours! It is through humble and eager use of error and proper identification of it that we reach successful conclusions. A man must use mistakes as his tools, his friends even, for improving his accuracy and for getting on with the happy business of living. Come, lad! You are young! Tell me what is the matter. You are brilliant. Why do you feel such gloom?"
–Warren Fahy, The Haunting of Sherlock Holmes
As some of you correctly pointed out, the claim that TON 618 is the largest object in the Universe is now outdated.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.
The curation of historical artifacts will become a cottage industry as we all share our perspectives from our object captures.
Ancient history will be forever changed as more folks can see what was only possible to appreciate in person.
My views are not really controversial.
I am a normal person from 2010 and nothing I say now would have been considered 'controversial' then.
Society just got stupid and I didn't go along with it. 😂