Ben Turner is a U.K. based staff writer at Live Science. He covers physics and astronomy, among other topics like tech and climate change. He graduated from University College London with a degree in particle physics before training as a journalist.
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.
Friction can cause the material spiraling 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 . 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.
After searching for potentially misidentified black holes in the survey, the researchers behind the new study, which they published Feb 19 in the journal Nature, found J0529-4351 hiding in plain sight. Further observations by the Very Large Telescope in the Atacama Desert confirmed that the bright object is a gigantic quasar, not a star.
By measuring the quasar’s perceived brightness and adjusting for its distance from Earth, the researchers estimated that the object was burning with the power of roughly 50 trillion suns .
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