Image courtesy of ESO/M. Kornmesser
Joel Kontinen
Astronomers have found a quasar 12 billion light years away hosting a supermassive black hole that gobbles up a sun-sized amount of mass every day
Space is wonderful,
full of things know as black holes.
Recently, “a quasar500 trillion times brighter than the sun has taken the title of the brightest
known object in the universe. It appears to be powered by a
supermassive black hole that is devouring a sun-sized amount of mass every day.”
Here what New
Scientist told of the find:
“Quasars are
galactic cores where gas and dust falling into a supermassive black hole
release energy in the form of electromagnetic radiation. Christian Wolf at the Australian National University in
Canberra and his colleagues first spotted the new brightest quasar, called
J0529-4351, in 2022 by combing through data from the Gaia space telescope and looking for extremely bright objects outside
the Milky Way that were misidentified as stars.
After following up
with further observations from the Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile, they
have now found it it is the most luminous object in the universe that we know
of.
Wolf and his colleagues used a device on the VLT
called a spectrometer to analyse the light coming from J0529-4351 and calculate
how much was produced by the black hole’s swirling disc of gas and matter,
called its accretion disc. This revealed that J0529-4351 is the fastest-growing
black hole in the universe, gobbling up around 413 solar masses per year, or
more than a sun per day”.
Source:
Alex Wilkins, 2024, Monster black hole powers the brightest known object in the universe | New Scientist 19 February
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