Brightest and fastest-growing: Astronomers identify record-breaking quasar

The black hole in this record-breaking quasar is growing in mass by the equivalent of one Sun per day, making it the fastest-growing black hole to date.

"We have discovered the fastest-growing black hole known to date. It has a mass of 17 billion Suns, and eats just over a Sun per day. This makes it the most luminous object in the known Universe," says Christian Wolf, an astronomer at the Australian National University and lead author of the study published today in. The quasar, called J0529-4351, is so far away from Earth that its light took over 12 billion years to reach us.

" says ANU PhD student and co-author Samuel Lai. Seven light-years is about 15,000 times the distance from the Sun to the orbit of Neptune. An automated analysis of data from the European Space Agency's Gaia satellite passed over J0529-4351 for being too bright to be a quasar, suggesting it to be a star instead. The researchers identified it as a distant quasar last year using observations from the ANU 2.3-metre telescope at the Siding Spring Observatory in Australia. Discovering that it was the most luminous quasar ever observed, however, required a larger telescope and measurements from a more precise instrument.

Christian Wolf, Samuel Lai, Christopher A. Onken, Neelesh Amrutha, Fuyan Bian, Wei Jeat Hon, Patrick Tisserand, Rachel L. Webster.While other simulations have modeled black hole growth, new model is the first single computer simulation powerful enough to comprehensively account for the numerous forces and factors that play into ...

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