The brightest quasar ever seen is powered by a black hole that eats a Sun a day
A newly discovered quasar is a real record-breaker.
Not only is it the brightest quasar ever seen, it’s also the brightest astronomical object ever seen. And it’s also powered by the hungriest and fastest growing black hole ever observed – one that consumes the equivalent of over one Sun’s mass a day. The quasar, J0529-4351, is located so far from Earth that its light has taken 12 billion years to reach us, meaning it’s seen as it was 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. Each year it eats, or accretes, the gas and dust equivalent to 370 solar masses. This makes J0529-4351 so luminous that if it were placed next to the Sun it would be 500 trillion times brighter than our brilliant star. “We have discovered the fastest growing black hole known to date. It has a mass of 17 billion Suns and eats just over a Sun per day,” team leader and Australian National University astronomer Christian Wolf said. “This makes it the most luminous object in the known universe.”
The light of J0529-4351 comes from the massive accretion disc that feeds the supermassive black hole, which the team estimates has a diameter of around seven light years. That means crossing this accretion disc would be equivalent to travelling between Earth and the Sun around 45,000 times. The team thinks the supermassive black hole at the heart of this quasar is feeding near the Eddington limit, the point at which the radiation it puts out should push away gas and dust, cutting off this black hole’s cosmic larder. Confirming this will require further detailed investigation.