SPACE
Scientists have spotted the brightest and fastest-growing quasar ever seen, a monster black hole that’s devouring a Sun’s worth of material every day. The brightly burning object, named J0529-4351, weighs between 17 and 19 billion solar masses and is located 12 billion light years from Earth, meaning it dates to a time when the universe was only 1.5 billion years old. Black holes are born when giant stars collapse in on themselves, and they grow by devouring all they encounter – be it gas, dust, stars, planets or other black holes. Friction can cause the material spiralling into the maws of these gluttonous space-time ruptures to heat up, which emits light that can be detected by telescopes, turning them into so-called active galactic nuclei (AGN).
The most extreme AGNs are quasars, supermassive black holes that are billions of times heavier than the Sun and shed their gaseous cocoons with light blasts trillions of times more luminous than the brightest stars. The quasar initially showed up in a 2022 survey by the European Space Agency’s Gaia spacecraft, which has been mapping the positions and movements of the Milky Way’s roughly 2 billion stars. However, as quasars often burn at least as brightly as stars, J0529-4351 was initially misidentified as one.
After searching for potentially misidentified black holes in the survey, a recent study revealed that researchers had found J0529- 4351 hiding in plain sight. Further observations by the Very Large Telescope (VLT) i
