Astronomers have made a groundbreaking discovery, identifying the brightest object ever observed in the universe.
This celestial marvel, a quasar named J0529-4351, shines with a luminosity 500 trillion times greater than that of our sun.
The discovery was made using the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) and has left the scientific community in awe.
This quasar’s incredible brightness, previously described in a study focused on data from the Very Large Telescope in Chile, comes from an active supermassive black hole (~17 Billion solar masses), which devours the mass at a rate of 1 sun per day.
The mass of this black hole is roughly 17 billion times the mass of the sun, making it the fastest growing black hole known to be.
The light from the quasar, which requires 12 billion years to travel to Earth, is of extreme importance in understanding the first stages in the evolution of the Universe.