Monster black hole powers the brightest known object in the universe

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

By Alex Wilkins

19 February 2024

Artist’s impression of the record-breaking quasar J0529-4351

ESO/M. Kornmesser

A quasar 500 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.

Read more

Is there an ancient black hole at the edge of the solar system?

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.

Advertisement

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.

Using these light spectra, the researchers also calculated that the mass of the black hole was between 5 billion and 50 billion solar masses.