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Astronomers have discovered what they believe to be the brightest object in the known universe: a quasar with a a supermassive black hole that devours a sun’s-worth of matter every day.
The object, named J0529-4351 and located 12 billion light years (a light year is 5.8 trillion miles) from Earth, is the fastest-growing quasar ever discovered.
It weighs between 17 billion and 19 billion solar masses (one solar mass is approximately equal to the mass of Earth’s sun).
It is also 500 trillion times brighter than our sun.
“This quasar is the most violent place that we know in the universe,” lead author Christian Wolf of Australian National University told the Associated Press in an email.
The discovery, reported in the journal Nature Astronomy on Monday, came as a result of researchers looking for extremely bright objects outside the Milky Way that were misidentified as stars.
Using data from the Gaia Space Telescope, the Australian National University Siding Spring Observatory and the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope, the researchers were able to determine that J0529-4351 devours the equivalent of one sun every day.
“The incredible rate of growth also means a huge release of light and heat,” Wolf said in a statement. “So, this is also the most luminous known object in the universe. It’s 200 trillion times brighter than our sun.”
“It’s a surprise it remained undetected until now, given what we know about many other, less impressive black holes,” said co-author Dr. Christopher Onken. “It was hiding in plain sight.”
Wolf added, “It looks like a gigantic and magnetic storm cell with temperatures of 10,000 degrees Celsius, lightning everywhere and winds blowing so fast they would go around Earth in a second.
“This storm cell is seven light years across, which is 50 percent more than the distance from our solar system to the next star in the Galaxy, alpha Centauri.”