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.
Category
🗞
NewsTranscript
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.