The brightest object ever observed is so far beyond the range of its peers that the astronomers who discovered it believe it will never be surpassed. It’s no surprise that there are big questions about how something like this could work so far from the scale we’re used to.

It is known that black holes have gravitational fields so strong that we cannot see them. But accretion disks, such as collapsing stars, where material rotates before being consumed, can be very bright. In fact, the accretion disks of supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies make quasars the brightest objects in the universe. The only reason they do not dominate our skies is because they are not near us; The nearest quasar is 600 million years ago.

How bright quasars can be is an open question, expanded by the discovery of J0529-4351 by the Siding Spring Observatory and confirmed by observations on the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope. J0529-4351 is similar in luminosity to two other powerful quasars, J0100+2802 and J2157-3602, and is located at a similar distance of about 12 billion light-years. But there is a big difference.

J0100+2802 and J2157-3602 have gravitational lenses; In any case, the closer galaxy focuses its light, making it appear much brighter than normal at our location. If this lensing is taken into account, these two quasars, although very bright, would be part of the main group of bright quasars we found during the exploration process.

The scientists who discovered J0529-4351 were unable to detect any significant lensing. Unless they’re missing something, this makes it at least an order of magnitude brighter than its seemingly similar counterparts, far ahead of other quasars, let alone objects we know of.

“It is also the brightest known object in the universe. It is 200 trillion times brighter than our Sun,” said Dr. Christian Wolff from the Australian National University, adding in his statement that he is doubtful that the record can be broken. An alternative estimate says the number is 500 trillion, but among friends the Sun is What does 300 trillion brightness mean?

The relationship between a quasar’s luminosity and its mass accretion rate is not perfect. Factors such as the angle at which we see it and the rotation speed of the diaphragm also play a role. With all this, the explorers believe they have enough information to calculate the feeding rate of this beast.

Some bright quasars are fueled by the Sun’s mass from the star; This mass is pulled into accretion disks and eventually disappears each year. J0529-4351 probably does the same thing every day.

Although J0529-4351 is not the largest black hole ever found, it is certainly 17 billion solar masses. The apparent contradiction between its extraordinary luminosity and its more ordinary mass is explained by its age, since we see it earlier than some comparable objects after the birth of the universe.

On the one hand, this means that it hasn’t had time to reach record size by the time we see it. On the other hand, feeding rates may also be higher. “In the teenage universe, matter moved chaotically and fed hungry black holes. Today stars move orderly at safe distances and rarely sink into black holes,” said Professor Rachel Webster of the University of Melbourne.

We can’t make out J0529-4351 from such a long distance. In any detail, however, closer analogues give us some strong clues. “It’s like a giant magnetic storm chamber with a temperature of 10,000 degrees Celsius, lightning is blowing everywhere and winds are blowing so fast it can fly around the Earth in a second,” Wolff said. “The diameter of this storm chamber is seven light-years, which is 50 percent greater than the distance from our Solar System to the next star in the Galaxy, Alpha Centauri.”

The apparent brightness of J0529-4351 is about 16- ^{and starry} It is similar in size to Pluto at the farthest point of its orbit. This means modern professional telescopes can easily detect it. The problem is determining that it is a quasar and not a star in our galaxy. Studies using the Gaia Space Telescope missed this because AI search programs were trained on known quasars and did not detect anything so out of step with other samples. “A human astronomer looking at the spectrum of Gaia would recognize the quasar and redshift at a glance,” the authors said.

Co-author Dr. Christopher Onken said: “Given what we know about many other, less impressive black holes, it is surprising that this one went unnoticed until now. It was hiding in plain sight.”