Scientists discovered what may be the universe’s brightest object on Monday — a quasar as luminous as 500 trillion suns.
“Increasing in mass by the equivalent of one sun per day, the quasar is 17 billion times stronger than the sun, making it the fastest growing black hole known to man,” an Australian-based Nature Astronomy team reported on Monday.
In 1980, the European Southern Observatory saw the quasar, J0529-4351, while conducting a sky survey, but it recorded it as a star. It was not verified as a quasar until last year with findings by telescopes in Australia and in Chile’s Atacama Desert.
This illustration provided by the European Southern Observatory in February 2024, depicts the record-breaking quasar J059-4351, the bright core of a distant galaxy that is powered by a supermassive black hole. (M. Kornmesser/ESO
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