A quasar 500 trillion times brighter than the Sun has been discovered – Kommersant
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A team of scientists from the Australian National University has found that the quasar, known as J0529-4351, is 500 trillion times brighter than the Sun and may be the brightest in the Universe. Experts published a message about their discovery in the journal Nature Astronomy.
A quasar (derived from the words quasi-stellar and radiosource, that is, “star-like radio source”) is the active nucleus of a galaxy at the initial stage of its development. The black hole in such nuclei is supermassive and absorbs surrounding matter. In this case, a rotating disk of gases appears, producing powerful radiation, which makes quasars unusually bright cosmic objects.
Quasar J0529-4351 is considered by scientists to be the brightest known object in the Universe and perhaps the “most turbulent.” Its black hole is 17–19 billion times heavier than the Sun and is growing at a rapid pace. Every year it absorbs the equivalent of 370 Suns of surrounding matter, that is, about a Sun per day. According to the European Southern Observatory, this is a record. The quasar is located at a distance of 12 billion light years from Earth (1 light year is equal to approximately 9.5 trillion km).
Interestingly, from 1980, when J0529-4351 was first discovered by astronomers, until last year, the object was considered a star. It was only during studies conducted in 2023 at observatories in Australia and in the Atacama Desert (Chile) that it was found that this was in fact a quasar.
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