- 4403
- BRIGHTEST QUASAR -
The brightest quasar ever seen is powered by black hole that eats a 'sun
a day'. This quasar, as bright as 500
trillion suns, has evaded astronomers for over 40 years because of its
incredible luminosity. Not only is it the brightest quasar ever seen, but it's
also the brightest astronomical object in general ever seen. It's also powered
by the hungriest and fastest-growing black hole ever seen. It consumes the equivalent of over one sun's
mass a day.
--------------------------------------------- 4403 -
BRIGHTEST QUASAR
-
- The quasar, “J0529-4351”, is located so far
from Earth that its light has taken 12 billion years to reach us, meaning it is
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 billion 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.
-
- J0529-4351 was spotted in data over 4
decades ago but was so bright that astronomers failed to identify it as a
quasar. How did a quasar fooled
astronomers for 44 years?
-
- Quasars are regions at the hearts of
galaxies that host supermassive black holes surrounded by the gas and dust
these voids feed on. The violent conditions in disks of matter around such
active black holes, called accretion disks and generated by the immense gravity
of the objects, heat the gas and dust and cause it to glow brightly.
-
- Any matter in these disks that doesn't get
accreted by a black hole is channeled to the poles where it is blasted out as a
jet of particles at near the speed of light, also generating powerful light. As
a result, quasars in these “Active Galactic Nuclei” (AGN) regions can shine
brighter than the combined light of billions of stars in the galaxies around
them.
-
- The light of J0529-4351 comes from the
massive accretion disk that feeds the supermassive black hole, which the team
estimates has a diameter of around 7 light-years. That means crossing this
accretion disk would be equivalent to traveling between Earth and the sun
around 45,000 times.
-
- It is a surprise that it has remained
unknown until today when we already know about a million less impressive
quasars. It has literally been staring us in the face until now. The Quasar J0529-4351 was initially spotted
in the Schmidt Southern Sky Survey, which dates back to 1980, but it took
decades to confirm it was a quasar to begin with. Large astronomical surveys
deliver so much data that astronomers need machine-learning models to analyze
them and sort quasars from other celestial objects.
-
- This quasar is so bright that models passed
it over believing it to be a star located relatively close to Earth. This misclassification was spotted in 2023,
when astronomers realized J0529-4351 is, in fact, a quasar after having a look at
the object's region using the 2.3-meter telescope at the Siding Spring
Observatory in Australia.
- The new discovery that this is actually the
brightest quasar ever was made when the X-shooter spectrograph instrument on
the Very Large Telescope (VLT) in the Atacama Desert region of Northern Chile
followed up on J0529-4351.
-
- The astronomers thinks the supermassive
black hole at the heart of this quasar is feeding near the Eddington limit, or
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 theory will require a
further detailed investigation. Fortunately, however, the greedy supermassive
black hole is the perfect target for an upgraded “GRAVITY + “ instrument at the
VLT, which will improve the high-contrast precision on bright objects. J0529-4351 will also be investigated by the
upcoming Extremely Large Telescope (ELT), currently under construction in the
Atacama Desert.
-
- However, it is the thrill of finding
something new and exciting that drives the leader of the team behind this
record-breaking discovery.
-
-
March 24, 2023 BRIGHTEST
QUASAR 4403
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--------------------- --- Monday, March 25, 2024
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