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Astronomers have spotted the brightest known object in the universe, and it’s a quasar powered by the fastest black hole on record, according to a new study. Initially classified as a star, the quasar managed to hide in plain sight until recently, surprising scientists.
Quasars are the luminous cores of distant galaxies. Without a doubt, these funny phenomena are the most remarkable objects in the cosmos — and scientists believe that they are inspired by supermassive black holes that are the central engines of large galaxies.
When astronomers spied a quasar called J0529-4351 using the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope, they discovered that the object is so far from our solar system that it took more than 12 billion years for his light to reach the Earth.
The black hole that powers the quasar eats the equivalent of one sun per day and has a mass about 17 billion times that of our sun, according to the researchers. A study detailing the surprising discovery appeared Monday in the journal Nature Astronomy.
“The incredible growth rate also means an enormous release of light and heat,” lead study author Christian Wolf, an associate professor in the Australian National University’s College of Science, said in a statement. “So this is also the most luminous object known in the universe. It is 500 trillion times brighter than our sun.”
Astronomers are eager to study the quasar, as well as other invisible objects, with new instruments and observatories in the future because distant supermassive black holes could answer key questions about the early days of the universe, such as how galaxies formed and developed.
A black hole is a source of enormous power
The intense gravitational influence of black holes pulls matter towards these celestial objects so energetically that the process creates light. The blinding radiation is due to the black hole’s accretion disk, or the ring around the black hole where matter collects before being consumed.
“It looks like a huge and magnetic storm cell with a temperature of 10,000 degrees Celsius (18,032 degrees Fahrenheit), lightning everywhere and winds blowing as fast as they would go around the Earth in a second,” Wolf said.
Astronomers know that if they see an extremely luminous quasar, it means a rapidly growing supermassive black hole is also present, and J0529-4351 remains the most remarkable for both reasons.
“All this light comes from a hot accretion disk that measures seven light-years in diameter — this must be the largest accretion disk in the Universe,” said study co-author Samuel Lai, a doctoral student at the Research School of Astronomy & University of Australia. Astrophysics, in statement.
Hiding in plain sight,
Wolf said he is not sure if the records set by J0529-4351 can ever be broken. While another team of scientists reported that the Hubble Space Telescope spotted a quasar as bright as 600 trillion suns in 2019, gravitational lensing intensified the object’s luminosity, a phenomenon in which galaxy clusters help magnify objects in the distant universe. The true luminosity of the quasar, known as J043947.08+163415.7, is thought to be closer to about 11 trillion suns, according to the researchers who made the initial discovery.
The quasar was first shown in images from the European Southern Observatory’s Schmidt Sky Southern Survey in 1980, but was not identified as a quasar.
“It is surprising that it remained unknown until today, when we already know about a million quasars that are not that big. It’s literally been staring us in the face so far,” study co-author Dr Christopher Onken, a research fellow at the Australian National University’s Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics, said in a statement.
Searching for quasars is an imperfect science
Searching for clues in large sky surveys is the best way to find a distant quasar, but the huge datasets generated by these massive surveys often need to be fed with machine learning models for analysis. The computer models can only pick out quasar candidates that appear to be known objects because the software is trained on existing data.
Newly discovered quasars may be more luminous than previously observed ones, meaning that computer models may reject the objects by classifying them as nearby bright stars.
This misidentification is what first happened to J0529-4351 when an automated program analyzing data from the European Space Agency’s Gaia satellite categorized the object as a star in June 2022.
But astronomers determined the object was a quasar when they spotted it in 2023 using the 2.3-metre telescope at the Australian National University’s Siding Spring Observatory near Coonabarabran in New South Wales. The team followed up on observations from the powerful Very Large Telescope in Chile’s Atacama Desert to confirm details about the black hole, including its mass.
“Personally, I like the chase,” Wolf said. “For a few minutes a day, I feel like a kid again, playing treasure hunt, and now I bring everything I’ve learned since then to the table.”
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