CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — Astronomers have discovered what may be the brightest object in the universe: a quasar with a black hole at its heart that is growing so fast that it swallows the equivalent of a sun per day.
This record quasar shines 500 trillion times brighter than our sun. The black hole that powers this distant quasar is more than 17 billion times larger than our Sun, an Australian-led team reported Monday in the journal Nature Astronomy.
While the quasar looks like a simple dot in images, scientists imagine a grim place.
The rotating disk around the quasar's black hole – glowing, swirling gas and other material from enveloped stars – resembles a cosmic hurricane.
“This quasar is the most violent place in the universe that we know of,” lead author Christian Wolf of the Australian National University said in an email.
The European Southern Observatory discovered object J0529-4351 during a sky survey in 1980, but it was assumed to be a star. Just last year it was identified as a quasar, the extremely active and luminous core of a galaxy. Observations from telescopes in Australia and the Chilean Atacama Desert have confirmed this.
“The exciting thing about this quasar is that it has been hidden in plain sight and was previously misclassified as a star,” Priyamvada Natarajan of Yale University, who was not involved in the study, said in an email.
These subsequent observations and computer modeling suggested that the quasar devours the equivalent of 370 suns per year, or about one per day. Further analysis shows that the mass of the black hole is 17 to 19 billion times that of our sun, the team says. Further observations are needed to understand its growth rate.
The quasar is 12 billion light-years away and has existed since the earliest days of the universe. A light year is about 9,500 billion kilometers long.