“Most violent place in the universe”: this black hole devours a sun every day

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A quasar is the luminous center of a galaxy with a black hole in the middle. These galactic nuclei owe their brightness to the supermassive black hole: it sucks in enormous amounts of matter and releases energy in the form of radiation.

Now astronomers have discovered what may be the brightest object in the universe. The black hole at the center is growing so fast that it is swallowing matter the size of our sun every day. Scientist Christian Wolf and his team from the Australian National University (ANU) report this in the journal ‘Nature Astronomy’.

Twelve billion light years away

The record-breaking quasar shines 500 trillion times brighter than our sun. The black hole that powers this distant quasar is more than 17 billion times larger than the sun.

The object, named J0529-4351, lies at the heart of a galaxy about twelve billion light-years away. It was discovered in 1980 by the European Southern Observatory. Until Wolf and his team’s breakthrough, scientists assumed the bright spot was a nearby star.

“This quasar is the most violent place we know in the universe,” Wolf told the AP. The breakthrough came last year thanks to observations with telescopes in Australia and the Chilean Atacama Desert. (no)

Source: Blick