Quasars are the bright nuclei of distant galaxies, formed by black holes of colossal masses. Quasar J0529-4351, recently examined by the VLT telescope in Chile, is more than 12 billion light-years from Earth – to give you an idea of how far Earth is at 8.3 light-minutes from the Sun. , which corresponds to 149.6 million kilometers. J0529-4351 is now considered the brightest object ever observed: it is 500 billion times brighter than our Sun, according to the European Southern Observatory (OES), which includes Portugal.
Quasar J0529-4351’s black hole is growing at a mass equivalent to the Sun per day, “making it the fastest-growing black hole discovered to date,” OES said. According to Christian Wolf, an astronomer at the Australian National University and first author of a study published in the journal Nature Astronomy cited by OES, “this quasar has the mass of almost 17 billion suns.”
Black holes are dense, dark bodies, which results from the gravitational pull they exert on matter. According to the OES, “black holes that power quasars remove matter from their environment through a process so energetic that it causes the object to emit enormous amounts of light.” Therefore, as the international organization states, “quasars are among the brightest objects in the sky, and even the most distant of them are visible from Earth.” Matter pulled toward the disk-shaped black hole 7 light-years in diameter, which corresponds to 15,000 times the distance between the Sun and the planet Neptune, “radiates so much energy that quasar J0529-4351 is more than 500 billion times brighter than the Sun,” OES reports. .