Astronomers identify the brightest celestial object with a mass of 17 billion suns

Humans have come a long way in studying the universe. With state-of-the-art equipment and technologies, space exploration has become way enhanced, with astronomers able to identify objects precisely that were missed out in the past. One such recent observation by the European Southern Observatory (ESO) has identified the universe's most luminous object ever, per the study published in Nature Astronomy. The Very Large Telescope (VLT) in the observatory has captured the brightest quasar, a radiant core of a distant galaxy, that is also growing significantly in mass and is breaking records in the world of astronomy.

On Monday, February 19, the ESO made a press release on this ground-breaking observation of the quasar called J0529-4351. Generally, the bright cores of the galaxies far away are powered by humongous black holes. While gathering matter from the surroundings, the black holes so much emit vibrant light that some of the brightest quasars are visible even from the earth. So, the extent of the brightness of the quasars also indicates how fast they are consuming matter from around them and growing substantially. Christian Wolf, an astronomer at the Australian National University (ANU) and the study's lead author, stated, "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. This makes it the most luminous object in the known Universe."

One of the most mind-boggling facts about J0529-4351 is that the black hole emits such massive energy, pulling humongous matter into it that the quasar is 500 trillion times more luminous than the Sun. Imagine the distance between the Sun and Neptune's orbit. Now multiply it by 15000. That's just the diameter of this quasar's accretion disc, the structure around the quasar, which the astronomers believe to be the largest in the universe. In 1980, this gigantesque luminous structure was captured by the Schmidt Southern Sky Survey but went unrecognized for decades until recently. The study's co-author and ANU astronomer, Christopher Onken, stated, "It is a surprise that it has remained unknown until today when we already know about a million less impressive quasars. It has been staring us in the face until now."

The study says that J0529-4351 is so far from Earth that it took more than 12 billion years for its light to reach us. Quasars are often hard to find and require accurate data from large areas of the space. The observation results in such massive amounts of data that it requires machine learning models to distinguish a quasar from a celestial object. The advancement in machine learning has trained models so that quasars are now identified faster than before. In the case of J0529-4351, the models rejected it as a star since it was brighter than previously observed quasars.

However, the researchers used observations from the ANU 2.3-metre telescope at the Siding Spring Observatory in Australia to identify the distant quasar last year. Thanks to the precise measurements by the X-shooter spectrograph on ESO’s VLT in the Chilean Atacama Desert, researchers were able to obtain some critical data. The supermassive black hole is expected to pave the way to unravel the mysteries of how the early universe formed and evolved.