A newly discovered quasar breaks multiple records, becoming not only the brightest quasar ever observed, but also the brightest celestial object ever found.
Simulation of the record-setting quasar J0529-4351. Image: ESA
The quasar J0529-4351 is so far away from Earth that light takes 12 billion years to reach us. Its energy comes from the hungriest and fastest-growing black hole ever seen, which consumes the mass of the Sun every day, according to research published on February 19 in the journal Nature Astronomy. The supermassive black hole at the quasar’s center is estimated to be 17 to 19 billion times more massive than the Sun. Every year, it “eats” or accretes” gas and dust equivalent to 370 Suns. That makes J0529-4351 shine 500 trillion times brighter than the Sun.
"We have discovered the fastest growing black hole ever known. It has the mass of 17 billion Suns and is eating more than one Sun every day. This makes it the brightest object in the universe," said astronomer Christian Wolf of the Australian National University, who led the research team.
J0529-4351 was discovered in data four decades ago, but was so bright that astronomers couldn’t identify it as a quasar. A quasar is a region at the center of a galaxy that contains a supermassive black hole, surrounded by a ring of dust and gas. The intense conditions in the accretion disk around an active black hole heat the dust and gas, causing it to glow. In addition, any matter in the disk that isn’t consumed by the black hole is directed toward its poles, shooting out as jets of particles at nearly the speed of light. As a result, quasars in active galactic nuclei (AGNs) can be brighter than the light from billions of surrounding stars combined.
But even so, J0529-4351 stands out. J0529-4351's light comes from the giant accretion disk that feeds the supermassive black hole. The team estimates its diameter at about 7 light-years, about 45,000 times the distance between Earth and the Sun.
J0529-4351 was originally discovered by the Schmidt Southern Sky Survey in 1980, but it took researchers decades to confirm that it was a quasar. Large astronomical surveys provide so much data that researchers needed machine learning models to analyze and classify quasars as other objects. In fact, J0529-4351 is so bright that the models suggested it was a star relatively close to Earth. The team identified J0529-4351 as a quasar using the 2.3-meter telescope at the Siding Spring Observatory in Australia.
Next, the supermassive black hole at its center is the perfect target for the GRAVITY+ instrument on the Very Large Telescope in Chile. J0529-4351 will also be studied using the Extremely Large Telescope (ELT), under construction in the Atacama Desert.
An Khang (According to Space )
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