2024-02-20 18:50:00
He’s a monster with an appetite you can barely imagine. Quasar J0529-4351 has a mass of 17 billion (!) suns, and eats the equivalent of just over one sun per day. Until then in the shadows, it was detected by the Very Large Telescope (VLT) of the European Southern Observatory (ESO).
Luminous cores of distant galaxies, quasars are powered by supermassive black holes. These collect so much material from their environment that they release large quantities of light.
«So much so that quasars are among the brightest objects in our sky, meaning that even the most distant quasars are visible from Earth. Typically, the brightest quasars indicate the fastest growing supermassive black holes“, noted the ESO in a press release.
«We discovered the fastest growing black hole known to date», rejoiced Christian Wolf, astronomer at the Australian National University (ANU) and lead author of the study published this week in Nature Astronomy.
Too big to be noticed
The matter that is attracted to J0529-4351 emits so much energy that this quasar is more than 500 trillion times more luminous than the Sun. It is precisely because of these extraordinary values that it had not been detected until now, the machine learning models scanning the images of the sky having excluded it from the results.
«Searching for quasars requires precise observational data over large areas of the skyexplains the ESO. The resulting data sets are so large that researchers often use machine learning models to analyze them and distinguish quasars from other celestial objects. However, these models are trained based on existing data, which limits potential candidates to objects similar to those already known. If a new quasar is brighter than any previously observed, the program might reject it and classify it instead as a star not too far from Earth».
«The discovery and study of distant supermassive black holes might help elucidate some of the mysteries of the early Universe, particularly how these holes and the galaxies that shelter them formed and evolved.», Adds the European Observatory.
If you feel like a black hole hunter, know that the program Black Hole Hunters calls on you to uncover the millions of stellar black holes hidden in our galaxy. A way to contribute to the space adventure…
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