Astronomers have discovered the brightest object in the known universe using the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope.
The object is a quasar named J0529-4351, located over 12 billion light years from Earth.
Quasars are extremely bright cores of galaxies powered by supermassive black holes at their centers.
This quasar is estimated to be over 500 trillion times brighter than the Sun. It has a mass of 17 billion suns and consumes over one sun’s worth of material per day.
The quasar’s accretion disc, where material falls into the black hole, measures 7 light years in diameter – likely the largest known.
Studying it revealed it is growing rapidly, equivalent to one sun per day, making it the fastest growing black hole discovered.
Though visible since 1980, astronomers only recently classified it as the brightest quasar after confirmation studies with the VLT telescope.
Observing extremely bright objects like this quasar provides insights into the early universe, galaxy formation and evolution.
Source: NDTV
