A newly discovered quasar is a real record breaker. It is not only the brightest quasar ever seen, but also the brightest astronomical object ever seen overall. It is also powered by the hungriest and fastest-growing black hole ever seen; This black hole consumes the equivalent of the mass of one Sun per day.
Quasar J0529-4351 is so far from Earth that its light took 12 billion years to reach us, meaning it appears as it did when the 13.8 billion-year-old universe was just under 2 billion years old.
The supermassive black hole at the heart of the quasar is estimated to be between 17 and 19 billion times the mass of the sun; It eats up or “accumulates” the equivalent of 370 solar masses of gas and dust each year. This makes J0529-4351 so bright that if it were placed near the Sun, it would be 500 trillion times brighter than our brighter star.
“We have discovered the fastest growing black hole known to date. It has a mass of 17 billion suns and eats just over one sun a day,” team leader and Australian National University astronomer Christian Wolf said in a statement. “This makes it the brightest object in the known universe.”
J0529-4351 was detected in data more than 40 years ago, but it was so bright that astronomers were unable to identify it as a quasar.
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How a quasar fooled astronomers for 44 years
Quasars are regions at the heart of galaxies that host supermassive black holes surrounded by the gas and dust that feed these cavities. In the disks of matter around such active black holes, called accretion disks, the violent conditions created by the objects’ immense gravity heat the gas and dust, causing them to glow brightly.
Additionally, any matter in these disks that is not accreted by a black hole is channeled to the poles of the cosmic titan, where it is ejected as a jet of particles at close to the speed of light, producing strong light at the same time. As a result, quasars in these Active Galactic Nucleus (AGN) regions can shine brighter than the combined light of billions of stars in the galaxies around them.
But even in these extremely bright events, J0529-4351 stands out.
J0529-4351’s light comes from the massive accretion disk feeding the supermassive black hole, which the team estimates is about 7 light-years across. This means that crossing this accretion disk would be equivalent to traveling between the Earth and the Sun approximately 45,000 times.
“It’s surprising that it wasn’t known until now when we already know about a million less impressive quasars. It was literally staring us in the face until now,” team member and Australian National University scientist Christopher Onken said. said. expression.
J0529-4351 was first detected in the Schmidt Southern Sky Survey dating back to 1980, but it took decades to initially confirm that it was a quasar. Large astronomical surveys provide so much data that astronomers need machine learning models to analyze it and distinguish quasars from other celestial objects.
These models are also trained using already discovered objects; This means they may miss candidates with exceptional properties, such as J0529-4351. In fact, this quasar is so bright that models have ignored it, believing it to be a star relatively close to Earth.
This misclassification was noticed in 2023 when astronomers realized that J0529-4351 was actually a quasar after looking at the object’s region using the 2.3-meter telescope at Siding Spring Observatory in Australia.
New discovery that this is actually the brightest quasar non-stop It was made by tracking J0529-4351 with the X-shooter spectrograph instrument on the Very Large Telescope (VLT) in the Atacama Desert region of northern Chile.
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Astronomers aren’t done with J0529-4351 yet.
The team thinks that the supermassive black hole at the heart of this quasar is fed near the Eddington boundary, that is, the point where the radiation it emits cuts off the cosmic reservoir of this black hole, pushing away gas and dust.
Confirming this will require further investigation. Fortunately, the greedy supermassive black hole is a perfect target for the upgraded GRAVITY+ instrument, which will increase high-contrast sensitivity on bright objects in the VLT.
J0529-4351 will also be studied by the Extremely Large Telescope (ELT), currently under construction in the Atacama Desert.
But it’s the excitement of finding something new and exciting that drives the team’s leader behind this record-breaking discovery.
“Personally, I love the chase. For a few minutes a day, I feel like a kid playing treasure hunt again, and now I bring everything I’ve learned since then to the table,” concluded Wolf.
The team’s research was published Monday, February 19, in the journal Nature Astronomy.