February 20, 2024
4 min read
The quasar, as bright as 500 trillion suns, has evaded astronomers for over 40 years because of its incredible luminosity
An artist’s impression of the record-breakin quasar J059-4351, the bright core of a distant galaxy illuminated by a supermassive black hole. This black hole has a mass of 17 billion times that of our sun, and consumes an entire sun’s mass of material per day.
A newly discovered quasar is a real record-breaker. Not only is it the brightest quasar ever seen, but it’s also the brightest astronomical object in general ever seen. It’s also powered by the hungriest and fastest-growing black hole ever seen — one that consumes the equivalent of over one sun’s mass a day.
The quasar, J0529-4351, is located so far from Earth that its light has taken 12 billion years to reach us, meaning it is seen as it was when the 13.8 billion-year-old universe was just under 2 billion years old.
The supermassive black hole at the heart of the quasar is estimated to be between 17 billion and 19 billion times the mass of the sun; each year, it eats, or “accretes” the gas and dust equivalent to 370 solar masses. This makes J0529-4351 so luminous that if it were placed next to the sun, it would be 500 trillion times brighter than our brilliant star.
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“We have discovered the fastest-growing black hole known to date. It has a mass of 17 billion suns and eats just over a sun per day,” team leader and Australian National University astronomer Christian Wolf said in a statement. “This makes it the most luminous object in the known universe.”
J0529-4351 was spotted in data over 4 decades ago but was so bright that astronomers failed to identify it as a quasar.
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