2024-02-23 18:09:00
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This artist’s impression shows the record-breaking quasar J059-4351, the bright core of a distant galaxy powered by a supermassive black hole. © ESO/M. grain knife
A newly discovered black hole has unimaginable dimensions. It’s hard to believe it was overlooked in the sky for decades.
Cerro Paranal – The universe is full of superlatives – and at the forefront are black holes. Now a research team has discovered an object that breaks several records. The research group led by astronomer Christian Wolf (Australian National University) examined the quasar J0529-4351 and experienced a surprise: the object with the complicated name is not only the brightest quasar known to date, but also the most luminous celestial object that has been observed to date .
A quasar is the active nucleus of a galaxy and is powered by a supermassive black hole. The black hole that powers quasar J0529-4351 is breaking records. “We have discovered the fastest growing black hole known to date,” explains Wolf, lead author of a study in the specialist journal Nature Astronomy published became. The astronomer tries to make the dimensions of the celestial body tangible: “It has a mass of 17 billion solar masses and consumes a little more than one solar mass per day. This makes it the most luminous object in the known universe.”
The region of the sky where the record-breaking quasar J0529-4351 is located. The image was created from images from the Digitized Sky Survey 2, the inset shows the position of the quasar in an image from the Dark Energy Survey. © ESO/Digitized Sky Survey 2/Dark Energy Survey
Black hole and quasar break records in the universe
The quasar is so far from Earth that its light took more than twelve billion years to reach Earth. It shines more than 500 trillion times brighter than the sun. However, the unimaginable numbers are even better: “All this light comes from a hot accretion disk with a diameter of seven light years – this must be the largest accretion disk in the universe,” adds co-author Samuel Lai. For comparison: Seven light years is 15,000 times the distance between the Sun and the most distant planet, Neptune.
All the numbers sound as if the newly discovered quasar couldn’t actually be overlooked. But that’s exactly what happened anyway. “It is strange that it has remained unrecognized to this day when we already know a million less impressive quasars. “He’s literally been staring us in the face up until now,” marvels co-author Christopher Onken in one notice.
Brightest quasar was long overlooked in space
However, there is a reason why the quasar has only now been discovered, which lies in the technology used: In order to distinguish quasars from other celestial objects in large data sets, models based on machine learning are often used. Because these models are trained with existing data, such a program may reject a celestial body that falls out of the grid as a distant quasar and instead classify it as a nearby star.
What is a quasar and what is a supermassive black hole?
A Quasar is the active, bright core of a galaxy. In visible light it looks like a star (point-like). In other wavelengths it emits very large amounts of energy. The term quasar is derived from the English “quasi-stellar radio source” – in German: “star-like radio source”.
Supermassive black holes are at the center of most galaxies. They power quasars. A black hole is a celestial body whose mass is concentrated in a very small volume. As a result, the object has such strong gravity that not even light can leave it. The outer boundary of the black hole is called the “event horizon.” Matter orbits around a black hole, the so-called “accretion disk”. It is their emission of radiation that is seen as a luminous quasar.
Supermassive black holes are exciting for research
That’s exactly what happened with J0529-4351. The object can already be seen in images from 1980, but only now has it been possible to classify the luminous celestial object as a quasar. Ultimately, the X-Shooter spectrograph on the European Southern Observatory’s (ESO) Very Large Telescope in Cerro Paranal, Chile, provided the crucial data and showed how extreme the quasar is.
Distant supermassive black holes are of great interest to researchers because they hold secrets from the early days of the universe. But that’s not the only reason why astronomer Wolf is looking for them, as he admits: “Personally, I just like hunting. For a few minutes a day I feel like a kid playing treasure hunt again, but this time I bring with me everything I’ve learned since then.” (tab)
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