Astronomers have discovered a quasar that is 500 trillion times brighter than the Sun and say it could be the brightest and “most violent” place in the universe.
The supermassive black hole that powers it is said to be between 17 and 19 billion times the mass of the Sun and is growing at the fastest rate ever seen.
Quasars are the bright cores of active galaxies, those that have supermassive black holes that consume enormous amounts of matter.
The record-breaking quasar, discovered by an Australian team, swallows the equivalent of the sun per day as it pulls in vast amounts of gas.
The rotating disk of gas around its black hole has been compared to a cosmic hurricane – which experts say emits so much energy that it is more than 500 trillion times brighter than the sun.
“This quasar is the most violent place we know in the universe,” said lead author Christian Wolf of the Australian National University.
It was thought to be a star when it was first spotted in 1980, but last year it was reclassified as a quasar after observations in the Atacama Desert in Australia and Chile.
Astronomers now think it consumes the equivalent of 370 suns a year, about one a day, making it the fastest-growing black hole on record, according to the European Southern Observatory (ESA).
The quasar is known as J0529-4351 and is 12 billion light-years away (a light-year is 9.3 trillion kilometers).
“The exciting thing about this quasar is that it was hiding in plain sight and was previously misclassified as a star,” said Yale University astrophysicist Priyamvada Natarajan – who was not involved in the study.
The research was published in the journal Nature Astronomy.
Photo ©️ ESO / M. Kornmesser
