The artist's impression shows the record-breaking quasar J059-4351, a bright core of a distant galaxy powered by a supermassive black hole. Using ESO's Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile, this quasar was discovered to be the brightest known object in the universe to date. The supermassive black hole seen here absorbs the surrounding material and is 17 billion times more massive than the Sun, and has an increase in mass equivalent to another Sun per day, making it the fastest-growing black hole ever recorded. **eso/m. kornmesser
Using the Very Large Telescope (VLT) of the European Southern Observatory (ESO), astronomers characterized the bright quasar and found that it was not only the brightest of its kind, but also the brightest ever seen. Quasars are the bright cores of distant galaxies, and supermassive black holes power them.
The mass of the black hole in this record-breaking quasar is growing at a rate equivalent to one sun per day, making it the fastest-growing black hole to date.
The black holes that power quasars emit large amounts of light by collecting material from their surroundings through high-energy processes. So much so that quasars are among the brightest objects in our sky, which means that even distant objects can be seen from Earth. In general, the brightest quasars represent the fastest-growing supermassive black holes.
We have discovered the fastest-growing black hole known to date. It has a mass of 17 billion suns and eats a little more than one sun a day. This makes it the brightest object in the known universe," said Christian Wolf, an astronomer at the Australian National University (ANU) and the lead author of the study, who published Nature Astronomy. This quasar, named J0529-4351, is so far away from Earth that its light took more than 12 billion years to reach us.
The material being pulled towards this black hole, in the form of a disk, emits so much energy that J0529-4351 is more than 500 trillion times brighter than the Sun. "All of this light comes from a thermal accretion disk with a diameter of seven light-years – which must be the largest accretion disk in the universe," said Samuel Lai, a PhD student and co-author at the Australian National University. Seven light-years is about 15,000 times the orbital distance from the Sun to Neptune.
Remarkably, this record-breaking quasar is hidden in plain sight. "Surprisingly, to this day, when we already know about a million less impressive quasars, it remains unknown. Until now, it's been staring into our faces," said co-author Christopher Onken, an astronomer at the Australian National University. He added that the object appeared in images from the Eso Schmidt Southern Sky Survey in 1980, but it was not recognized as a quasar until decades later.
The search for quasars requires precise observational data from large areas of the sky. The resulting datasets are so large that researchers often use machine learning models to analyze them and distinguish quasars from other celestial bodies.
However, these models are trained on existing data, which limits potential candidates to be similar to known objects. If a new quasar is brighter than any other previously observed quasar, the program may reject it and classify it as a star not too far from Earth.
Automated analysis of data from the European Space Agency's Gaia satellite concluded that J0529-4351 was too bright to be a quasar, suggesting that it was a star. Last year, researchers used ANU 2 from the Sidding Spring Observatory in AustraliaObservations from a 3-meter telescope identified it as a distant quasar.
However, finding it to be the brightest quasar ever observed requires larger telescopes and more precise instruments to measure. The X-Shooter spectrometer on the VLT in the Atacama Desert in Chile provided critical data.
The fastest-growing black hole ever observed would also be the perfect target for the Gr**ity+ upgrade on ESO's VLT Interferometer (VLTI), which is designed to accurately measure the mass of black holes, including those far from Earth. In addition, ESO's Very Large Telescope (ELT), a 39-meter telescope under construction in the Atacama Desert in Chile, will make it more feasible to identify and characterize these elusive objects.
This image shows the region of the sky where the record-breaking quasar J0529-4351 is located. Using ESO's Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile, this quasar was discovered to be the brightest known object in the universe to date. This image was created from the images that form part of the Digitized Sky Survey 2, while the inset shows the location of the quasar in the dark energy survey image. **ESO Digital Sky Survey 2 Dark Energy Sky Survey.
Finding and studying distant supermassive black holes could reveal some of the mysteries of the early universe, including how they and their host galaxies formed and evolved. But that's not the only reason Wolf is looking for them. "Personally, I just like to chase," he said. "Taking a few minutes a day, I feel like a kid again, playing a scavenger hunt, and now I bring everything I've learned since then to the table. ”