A team of Australian astronomers have discovered what might be the lightest object in the universe, a quasar 500 trillion times brighter than our Sun that is powered by the hungriest and fastest-growing black hole ever seen.
The Australian team reported Monday in the journal Nature Astronomy that the quasar, named J0529-435, has a black hole at its center that is between 17 billion and 19 billion times the mass of our Sun, space.com reported, which is nearly 1.98 nonillion kilograms, according to NASA.
The light emanating from the quasar took about 12 billion years to reach Earth, meaning it was seen at about 2 billion years after the Big Bang.
The lead authors of the report are Christian Wolf, Samuel Lai, Christopher A. Onken, and Neelesh Amrutha from the Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics at Australian National University. They observed the quasar using the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope in Chile.
"The black hole is seen about 12 billion years in the past; it has taken the light that long to reach us," Wolf told Newsweek. "However, as the universe continuously expands and is now larger than it was while the light traveled, the black hole is now further away than 12 billion light years, more like 24 billion light years."
Wolf said black holes are hard to detect, but as they consume matter, which is drawn into an accretion disc, a holding pattern in which the material circles the black hole before getting swallowed.
"The accretion disc is seven light years across, which is one-and-a-half times the distance from the solar system to the nearest star, Alpha Centauri," Wolf told Newsweek.
Wolf said it's safe to assume J0529-435 "is the most violent place that we know in the universe."
"[The accretion disc] is like a giant hurricane with the black hole in the eye of the storm," he said. "The clouds are moving at ever-increasing speeds the closer we get to the hole and can reach 100,000 [kilometers] per second. They move as far in a second as the Earth moves in an hour; they cover the circumference of the Earth in under a second.
"The disc is hot, from thousands of degrees Fahrenheit on the outside to 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit at the edge of the eye of the storm. The whole storm is threaded with strong magnetic fields and there are lightning bolts of cosmic size discharging everywhere."
Michael Katz ✉
Michael Katz is a Newsmax reporter with more than 30 years of experience reporting and editing on news, culture, and politics.
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