A hungry black hole feeding a record-breaking quasar provides the energy to emit enough light that astronomers say is the brightest object ever observed.
Astronomers used the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile to observe a quasar known as J0529-4351 and published their findings in Nature Astronomy.
According to NASA, quasars are the extremely bright cores at the center of galaxies feeding off the energy consumed by supermassive black holes. The study authors say the black hole in the quasar is growing in mass by one sun a day, making it the fastest-growing black hole discovered yet.
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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. This makes it the most luminous object in the known Universe,” said study author Christian Wolf, an astronomer at the Australian National University.
Astronomers define huge astronomical objects compared to our solar system’s Sun. The mass of a black hole is usually called a “solar mass.” One solar mass is defined as the mass of our Sun.
Quasar J0529-435’s supermassive black hole has a mass of 17 billion suns. The matter being pulled toward the black hole that forms a disc emits more than 500 trillion times more luminous energy than the Sun.
The hot accretion disc where all this matter is pulled measures seven light-years in diameter. Study co-author Samuel Lai, also with ANU, estimates it is the largest accretion disc in the Universe.
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Quasar J0529-435 is so far away that its light took more than 12 million light years to reach the telescope, or about 15,000 times the distance from the Sun and Neptune in our solar system, according to the study.
There may be brighter and more massive quasars in the Universe. However, the study authors said that although quasars are the brightest objects in the Universe, the rarest and brightest are the hardest to find.
“Finding quasars requires precise observational data from large areas of the sky. The resulting datasets are so large, researchers often use machine-learning models to analyze them and tell quasars apart from other celestial objects,” ESO said in a news release. “However, these models are trained on existing data, which limits the potential candidates to objects similar to those already known. If a new quasar is more luminous than any other previously observed, the program might reject it and classify it instead as a star not too distant from Earth.”
This object was first discovered in 1980 during the ESO Schmidt Southern Sky Survey but wasn’t identified as a quasar until recently.
An analysis of a European spacecraft observation of the object found it too bright, and astronomers believed it was a star. However, last year, on a second look using the Siding Spring Observatory in Australia, astronomers re-identified J0529-4351 as a distant quasar.
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“It is a surprise that it has remained unknown until today, when we already know about a million less impressive quasars. It has literally been staring us in the face until now,” said co-author Christopher Onken, an astronomer at ANU.
Once astronomers realized it was a quasar, they brought in the big guns using ESO’s Very Large Telescope to measure the object and determine its mass.
ESO said its 39-meter Extremely Large Telescope, currently under construction in Chile, will make identifying such luminous objects even more attainable.