Astronomers discovered the brightest powered quasar supermassive black hole that went unnoticed for over 4 decades!
Not just that. This quasar is also the brightest astronomical object ever observed, with a brightness reaching 500 trillion as bright as the Sun!
Inevitably, this is the quasar that broke the record for brightness in the Universe today.
Kuasar at a Glance
Quasar. We know this object as the center of an active galaxy that is so bright that observers on Earth can see the quasar but its host galaxy is often invisible.
When it was first discovered in the 1950s, this object appeared to be bright like a star but in radio wavelengths rather than visible light. Therefore, this object was given a name quasi stellar radio source (quasar) or star-like radio sources.
Quasars are very far away and move very fast, up to 30% the speed of light. The only explanation, the quasars are so far away that their speed is all the rate of expansion of the universe itself. With a brightness that can be thousands of times brighter than the entire contents of the Milky Way, of course there is something that is the source of its energy.
Being in the central area of the galaxy and shining even brighter than its home galaxy, inevitably, the power source of the quasar is a giant monster in the center of the galaxy. Supermassive black hole.
But, keep in mind that black holes do not emit light. No light can escape from a black hole.
Quasars are located in the central areas of galaxies that are populated by supermassive black holes and surrounded by matter in a surrounding accretion disk. Don’t imagine calm matter around a black hole.
The life of matter within the accretion disk is violent. The gravitational influence of a black hole is so large that the material in the disk moves at almost the speed of light. Collisions between materials occur, and what is certain is that the gas and dust in the disk heats up and eventually glows brightly. There is gas and dust that falls into supermassive black holes and the energy released can reach 60 times greater than the energy produced by nuclear fusion reactions in the center of the star.
Matter that does not fall into the black hole will be funneled towards the poles and released in the form of jets of high-speed particles that are also very bright. Because of this, quasars in the central area of the galaxy can shine brighter than the combined light of billions of stars in the surrounding galaxy.
Thus, the brighter the quasar, the faster the black hole at the center grows.
The Brightest Quasar
Area lokasi Kuasar J0529-4351. Kredit: ESO/Digitized Sky Survey 2/Dark Energy Survey
This time astronomers actually discovered a quasar that holds the record for the brightest in the Universe. The quasar, named J0529-4351, is in a distant galaxy 12 billion light years away. This shows that the quasar J0529-4351 is a quasar that came from the young Universe. That means, the light we receive has traveled for 12 billion years and this light began its journey when the Universe was only less than 2 billion years old.
This quasar is very bright because it is powered by a supermassive black hole whose mass is between 17-19 billion solar masses. What’s more interesting, this supermassive black hole devours 370 solar masses of material in a year or one Sun every day!
This shows how this supermassive black hole grows rapidly. When compared with the Milky Way, the current growth rate is very different because the supermassive black hole Sagittarius A* seems to be on a diet and if you compare it to a human, Sagittarius A* only eats one grain of rice in several million years.
With so much matter being devoured by the supermassive black hole in the center, it is inevitable that the energy emitted by quasar J0529-4351 is also very large and the quasar is very bright. It is so bright that if quasar J0529-4351 were next to the Sun, it would be 500 trillion times brighter.
However, the brightness of this quasar does not come from a single star but from a collection of material in the accretion disk around the supermassive black hole. And for quasar J0529-4351, the accretion disk stretches as far as seven light years or 15 thousand times the distance from the Sun to Neptune.
Such a bright object should have been discovered long ago. However, this record-breaking quasar for the brightness of all objects in the Universe is actually hidden from observers’ view.
Hidden from view
If we trace it back, quasar J0529-4351 was actually discovered 44 years ago in 1980 in ESO Schmidt Southern Sky Survey imagery. However, this object was not recognized as a quasar until 4 decades later.
Large surveys such as the ESO Schmidt Southern Sky Survey naturally produce large amounts of data that require machine-learning models to perform data analyzes that separate quasars from other objects in the universe. In order for a machine-learning model to recognize quasars and differentiate them from other objects, it needs existing data to train the model. As a result, these machine-learning models have other limitations in recognizing new, much brighter quasar data.
As a result, when there is quasar data that is brighter than previously existing quasars, the data is rejected. The machine-learning model actually classified the data as bright stars that are located quite close to Earth.
This incorrect classification was only discovered in 2023 when astronomers made observations with a 2.3 meter telescope at Siding Spring Observatory. The results of observations at the location of this bright star show that the object is actually a quasar in a distant galaxy. Further observations with the X-Shooter spectrograph installed on ESO’s VLT telescope in the Atacama Desert, Chile, showed that the new quasar is the brightest quasar ever observed.
From observational data, astronomers suspect that the black hole at the heart of quasar J0529-4351 is devouring material close to the Eddington limit. The Eddington limit is the equilibrium point between the outward pressure due to stellar radiation and the inward pressure due to gravity. In this case, radiant pressure would push gas and dust that breaks the black hole’s cosmic storage. To confirm this, there needs to be further observations with GRAVITY+ on the VLT Interferometer which is designed to measure the mass of black holes.
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2024-02-21 06:38:18
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