Astronomers Find What May Be the Universe’s Brightest Object

TIME

Astronomers have discovered what may be the brightest object in the universe, a quasar with a black hole at its heart growing so fast that it swallows the equivalent of a sun a day.

Transcript

00:00 It's a time when we astronomers get to be children again, in that we can look at an

00:08 object and be like, hey, we expected this to be just a normal star because of how bright

00:14 it looks.

00:15 But in fact, it's within 1.5 billion years of the universe's existence.

00:20 And it's just so extraordinary when we intensify this object.

00:25 What the researchers did to understand the precise amount of this luminosity was to look

00:33 into the spectrum of this quasar using very, very precise instrumentation, namely the European

00:42 Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope, using a very specific instrument called X-Shooter,

00:47 which is kind of the Swiss army knife for astronomers, because it is able to observe

00:53 a very long wavelength range at once and allows astronomers to study various chemical signatures

01:01 for within a given object.

01:04 Quasar is a supermassive black hole.

01:06 It's a black hole that's between millions to billions of solar masses and times the

01:13 mass of the sun.

01:14 So maybe a billion times the mass of the sun.

01:16 But this guy is 17 billion times the mass of the sun.

01:20 So it being such a large black hole, it has an accretion disk, or let's say the most familiar

01:25 thing to us is like a hurricane.

01:28 There's a lot of material that's swirling around the black hole.

01:32 And because of certain viscous and radiative processes, this accretion disk, this material

01:37 gets incredibly hot.

01:39 And this heated material, let's say tens of thousands of degrees Fahrenheit, it would

01:44 glow extremely bright.

01:46 And because of this, they can glow to luminosities of up to 500 trillion suns, which is this

01:53 object.

01:54 It allows us to see the very early stages of formation of galaxies and their central

02:01 black holes.

02:02 We know nowadays that most of galaxies harbor in their centers, very massive black holes,

02:11 but we do not know how exactly they were formed, how exactly they were accreting their matter

02:15 to become so large.

02:18 Without these black holes, our galaxy as we know it, wouldn't be what it is today.

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