Monster black hole powers the brightest known object in the universe

A quasar 500 trillion occasions brighter than the solar has taken the title of the brightest known object in the universe. It seems to be powered by a supermassive black hole that’s devouring a sun-sized quantity of mass daily.

Quasars are galactic cores the place gasoline and dirt falling right into a supermassive black hole launch vitality in the type of electromagnetic radiation. Christian Wolf at the Australian National University in Canberra and his colleagues first noticed the new brightest quasar, known as J0529-4351, in 2022 by combing via knowledge from the Gaia area telescope and in search of extraordinarily vibrant objects exterior the Milky Way that had been misidentified as stars.

After following up with additional observations from the Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile, they’ve now discovered it it’s the most luminous object in the universe that we all know of.

Wolf and his colleagues used a tool on the VLT known as a spectrometer to analyse the gentle coming from J0529-4351 and calculate how a lot was produced by the black hole’s swirling disc of gasoline and matter, known as its accretion disc. This revealed that J0529-4351 is the fastest-growing black hole in the universe, gobbling up round 413 photo voltaic lots per yr, or greater than a solar per day.

Using these gentle spectra, the researchers additionally calculated that the mass of the black hole was between 5 billion and 50 billion photo voltaic lots.

Wolf and his colleagues additionally discovered the earlier brightest quasar, which was round half the brightness of J0529-4351, in 2018. Wolf thinks the new discovery is more likely to stay the record-holder for a while, as the overwhelming majority of the observable sky has now been surveyed in excessive element, because of in depth star catalogues equivalent to that produced by Gaia. “This is the biggest unicorn with the longest horn on its head that we’ve found. I don’t think we’re going to top that record,” says Wolf.

The quasar’s accretion disc seems to be the widest but known, at 7 gentle years throughout. This presents an uncommon alternative to picture the black hole straight and precisely measure its mass, says Christine Done at Durham University, UK. “This is big enough and bright enough that we could resolve it with our current instruments,” says Done. “So we could have a much more direct measure of the black hole mass in this monster, and that’s what I did get quite excited about.”

The VLT is at present having its spectroscopic devices upgraded as a part of the Gravity+ venture and will then be capable to resolve J0529-4351’s options in element. This will imply that totally different components of the quasar’s accretion disc might be differentiated and higher understood, says Done, although it might take a number of years.