This artist’s impression shows the record-breaking quasar J059-4351, the bright core of a distant galaxy that is powered by a supermassive black hole. Using ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile, this quasar has been found to be the most luminous object known in the Universe to date. The supermassive black hole, seen here pulling in surrounding matter, has a mass 17 billion times that of the Sun and is growing in mass by the equivalent of another Sun per day, making it the fastest-growing black hole ever known.
The Sun has a mass of about 330,000 times that of the Earth, but this figure is dwarfed by the black holes at the centers of galaxies. A team of astronomers recently discovered the fastest growing one: a black hole with a mass of 17 billion Suns, which is growing at the rate of one solar mass per day.
This black hole is actually a quasar, which is an actively feeding black hole. When quasars accrete matter — that is, when their strong gravitational fields attract gas, dust, and other cosmic debris — they emit enormous amounts of radiation that can be detected by a number of Earth-based telescopes, transmits Gizmodo.
The quasar is named J0529-4351, its redshift is 3.9, which means it is more than 12 billion years old. The team of astronomers observed it in the optical and near-infrared bands using the Very Large Telescope of the European Southern Observatory in the Chilean Atacama Desert research published in the journal Nature Astronomy.
We have discovered the fastest-growing black hole known today. This is the brightest object in the known Universe.
— Christian Wolf, an astronomer at the Australian National University and lead author of the study.
Using the brightness of this quasar as an indicator of its accretion rate — since the brighter the quasar, the more mass is attracted to the black hole — the team determined that the quasar is attracting approximately 413 solar masses per year, or about 1.13 Suns per day.
J0529-4351 was spotted by stellar observatories back in 1980, but astronomers did not know it was a quasar at the time. When objects are brighter than any known quasars, models can interpret them as relatively close stars rather than giant distant objects. J0529-4351 is 500 trillion times brighter than our Sun, and the accretion disk that produces this light is seven light-years in diameter.
The object, which was previously thought to be a star because of its brightness, is actually an extremely bright and much more complex object located much deeper in space. Perhaps it will be better studied by future telescopes, including ESO’s own Extra Very Large Telescope, the successor to the Very Large Telescope.