Astronomers have found the brightest known quasar, J059-4351, located 12 billion light-years away, outshining our sun by 500 trillion times. The quasar’s supermassive black hole is consuming a sun’s-worth of mass daily, making it the fastest growing black hole ever observed. Although previously mistaken for a star, the quasar was rediscovered in 2022 using telescopes in Australia and Chile. The quasar’s intense brightness comes from friction in the accretion disc, which spans 15,000 times the distance between the sun and Neptune. Given the universe’s current state, researchers believe this quasar will likely remain the brightest object ever discovered.
Wonderful, my only loving home/maze. Every new find teaches us a little more about the cosmic amusement park we call home.
That is, until now. It turns out the answer was hiding in plain sight for astronomers. They've discovered the oldest and most distant quasar in existence, some 12 billion light-years away. This quasar, called J059-4351, is so bright that it shines 500 trillion (yes, with a T) times brighter than our sun.
Consider, if you will, a body in the sky with light-producing capabilities far beyond anything we are used to. The brightness means that quasar smashes records and becomes an interesting question: how can it shine like this? But what does it imply for how we think about black holes? Discoveries of this kind can genuinely alter the fabric by which we understand reality as a whole.
Quasars are fascinating. They are energized by supermassive black holes at galactic cores. This is one of the most extreme examples, J059-4351. A thousand solar masses vanish into the greedy maw of its central point-mass black hole every day. The European Space Agency has dubbed it the fastest-growing black hole ever recorded. But isn't that simple fact in and of itself breathtaking? An atmosphere of cosmic destruction pushes us everywhere and everything is in drag — out of range.
Sprawling across seven light-years, the quasar puts on quite a show of energy. However, this eating process is accompanied by friction, creating a 15,000 times Sun-Neptune distance size accretion disk that catches fire (GTK). That creates an amazing heat output. The massive collision is like a brilliant cosmic fireworks display on an otherwise dark expanse. “[It is] the most extreme place that we know of in the universe,” lead researcher Christian Wolf said. And of course, these descriptions have a way of firing up our imaginations.
It boggles the mind: seeing for us in 1980 a quasar, though we misread it as just a star. How could something so massive have gone unseen for this long? This ultra-rare object was missed by the machine-learning algorithms which had been trained to pick up on known quasars because it stands out as a clear anomaly from those expected trends. Australian observations were key in revealing the truth. Why is our perception of the universe so limited? Time zones, maybe – they do have a certain breadth and elaborateness about them.
New technologies, combined with the passage of time, can illuminate previously invisible things in astronomy. Observations with the Very Large Telescope in Chile verified that J059-4351 is more than 30 times brighter. The transition from quasars as obscurer into the mainstream of astronomy has opened a floodgate, with further mysteries and enigmas awaiting investigation about both quasars and black holes. Insights like this will provide a way to understand what these entities do to their local environment and thereby have an impact on cosmic evolution.
Now, let's talk numbers. The black hole in J059-4351 is at least 17 billion times the mass of our Sun, swallowing up anything equal to a total that weighs more than four hundred times as heavy as an individual star each year. Its temperatures get up to as hot as 10,000 degrees Celsius. In fact, hotter than molten lava, right? It has taken the light from this quasar about 12 billion years to get here. The way I see it: this is a relic of the ancient universe, forcing us to take ourselves back in time when things were more chaotic in the heavens.
That makes scientists want to know more. The large numbers at work in the quasar's accretion disk could help enable a much more accurate measure of its black hole mass. All of this leads to another level: how did these gigantic black holes form in the early universe? Their dynamics are crucial for our understanding of cosmic history. Space, what else is there in the universe?
Yet, even though the process of growth in this quasar probably stopped billions of years ago, it remains a watershed moment for us all in our exploration of the cosmos. Conjectured Wolf: we may never see anything like that occur again as nothing might ever top it, and he's likely right on the money there. The excitement in the astronomical community is palpable. Every revelation calls on us to gaze upward and wonder afresh, kindling our natural-born interest in the cosmos as a whole. And really, isn't that the essence of exploration?
