It was right there: hidden in plain sight. It is the brightest object ever detected and was discovered in the distant Universe.
It is a quasar, the luminous nucleus of a galaxy powered by a gigantic black hole approximately 17 billion times the mass of our Sun and is known by a name that is an acronym: «J0529-4351». It was Australian scientists who spotted this quasar powered by the fastest-growing black hole ever discovered.
In the journal Nature Astronomy, scholars say the black hole has a voracious appetite, consuming the equivalent mass of a Sun every day. J0529-4351 was actually recorded in the data many years ago, but only now have its most incredible features been identified. «We have discovered an object that had not previously been recognized for what it is. It has looked us in the eye for many years because it has shone with its brightness longer than humanity has probably existed. But now we have recognized it, not as one of the many foreground stars in our Milky Way, but as a very distant object,” Christian Wolf, of the Australian National University, told BBC News.
The term quasar is used by astronomers to describe a particular type of Agn, or Active Galactic Nucleus. It is the energetic core of a galaxy powered by an immense black hole that is pulling matter towards it at a prodigious rate.
When this material is accelerated around the hole, it is torn apart and emits a huge amount of light, so much so that even a distant object like J0529-4351 is still visible to us. The emission of this quasar took 12 billion years to reach the VLT detectors. Everything about the object, in reality, is something surprising.
The scientists involved in his study claim that the energy emitted makes the quasar over 500 trillion times brighter than the Sun. «All this light comes from a hot accretion disk measuring seven light years in diameter. This must be the largest accretion disk in the Universe,” said ANU doctoral student and co-author Samuel Lai. To be clear, seven light years is approximately 15,000 times the distance between the Sun and the orbit of Neptune. The light from the celestial object traveled for more than 12 billion years to reach Earth.
Scientists at the Australian National University first spotted it using a 2.3-metre telescope at the university’s Siding Spring Observatory in Coonabarabran.