'The Most Violent Place in the Known Universe'
Astronomers made a groundbreaking discovery
Astronomers made a groundbreaking discovery: a quasar with a voracious black hole at its core, devouring the sun’s force day after day.
What is a quasar?
In astronomy, a quasar refers to an extremely bright and distant active galactic nucleus, which appears in visible light as a point source (like a star), rather than an extended body (like galaxies). Hence the name "quasar," as quasi-stellar means "star-like." Indeed, an initial rendering of the term in Greek, when first discovered, was "semistar."
So, this quasar sets a new record, shining 500 trillion times brighter than our sun, fueled by a black hole with a mass that is 17 billion times larger than our sun’s mass. Led by Christian Wolf of the Australian National University, the team reported their findings in Nature Astronomy.
Despite appearing as a mere dot in images, this quasar represents a wild cosmic phenomenon. The swirling disk of bright gas and matter surrounding the black hole resembles a cosmic hurricane. Wolf describes it as "the most violent place we know in the universe."
Initially identified as a star during a sky survey in 1980 by the European Southern Observatory, the object, named J0529-4351, was later recognized as a quasar. Priyamvada Natarajan of Yale University notes the excitement of discovering it "hiding in plain sight" and being previously misidentified as a star.
Further observations and computer modelling revealed that the quasar consumes power equivalent to that of 370 suns annually, roughly one per day. The black hole’s mass is estimated to be 17 to 19 billion times larger than that of our sun. Positioned at a distance of 12 billion light-years away, this quasar provides insights into the early universe, although more observations are needed for a full understanding of its growth rate.
“It's like a gigantic and magnetic storm cell with temperatures of 10k degrees Celsius, lightning everywhere and winds blowing so fast they would go around Earth in a second,” Wolf stated.
“This storm cell is seven light-years across, which is 50% more than the distance from our solar system to the next star in the galaxy, Alpha Centauri.”
Co-author, Dr Christopher Onken said it was surprising it had remained undetected for this long, and that it was “hiding in plain sight”.
Wolf talked about two feelings this discovery evoked in him.
“One part is a bit of a shock and awe moment, imagining this hellish place, these conditions, and that nature does produce something even more extreme than we’ve contemplated previously,” he said.
“The other is a bit of cheeky joy – we found it! Nature does not make it easy, it’s like ‘ah, there you are!’.”
