Astronomers discovered a quasar, which is the “brightest of its kind” and the “most luminous object ever observed,” using the European Southern Observatory’s (ESO) Very Large Telescope (VLT), a statement said.
From Newsweek: Astronomers have discovered the brightest object ever observed in the universe. Astronomers discovered a quasar, which is the “brightest of its kind” and the “most luminous object ever observed,” using the European Southern Observatory’s (ESO) Very Large Telescope (VLT), a statement said.
This record-breaking quasar is also growing rapidly, as is typical with the brightest quasars in the galaxy. The new study detailing the find, published in Nature Astronomy, reports that it is growing by the size of one sun per day and is over 500 trillion times brighter than the sun. It has been dubbed J0529-4351.
The lead author of the team described the discovery to Newsweek as “possibly most hellish place in the Universe,” due to its fast-moving clouds, extreme temperatures and because “there are lightning bolts of cosmic size discharging everywhere.”
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. This makes it the most luminous object in the known Universe,” Christian Wolf, an astronomer at the Australian National University (ANU) and lead author of the study, said in a summary of the findings.
Astronomers report that this quasar is so far away from Earth that it took over 12 billion years for us to see it. On Earth, quasars resemble stars. (Newsweek) What do they tell us about earth? According to NASA.gov “Quasars—accreting supermassive black holes—are paradoxically some of the brightest objects in the universe.
Why look for black holes and quasars? NASA explains… “Supermassive black holes, which likely reside at the centers of virtually all galaxies, are unimaginably dense, compact regions of space from which nothing — not even light — can escape. As such a black hole, weighing in at millions or billions of times the mass of the Sun, devours material, it is surrounded by a swirling disk of gas. When gas from this disk falls towards the black hole, it releases a tremendous amount of energy. This energy creates a brilliant and powerful galactic core called a quasar, whose light can greatly outshine its host galaxy.”Astronomers widely consider the energy from quasars to be the main driver in limiting the growth of massive galaxies“