Astronomers have discovered a quasar 500 trillion times brighter than the Sun, and they say it may be the brightest and “most violent” place in the universe.
The massive black hole that powers it is said to be between 17 and 19 billion times the mass of the Sun and growing at the fastest rate ever.
Quasars are the bright cores of “active galaxies” – those containing supermassive black holes that consume vast amounts of matter.
The record-breaking quasar, discovered by an Australian-led team, swallows the equivalent of a sun every day as it pulls in huge amounts of gas.
The disk of gas rotating around its black hole has been likened to a cosmic hurricane, which experts say emits so much energy that it is more than 500 trillion times brighter than the sun.
“This quasar is the most violent place we know of in the universe,” said lead author Christian Wolff from the Australian National University.
It was thought to be a star when it was first spotted in 1980, but was reclassified as a quasar last year after observations in Australia and Chile's Atacama Desert.
Astronomers now believe it consumes the equivalent of 370 suns per year, or about one per day, making it the fastest-growing black hole yet, according to the European Southern Observatory (ESA).
The quasar is known as J0529-4351 and is 12 billion light-years away (one light-year equals 5.8 trillion miles).
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“The interesting thing about this quasar is that it was hiding in plain sight and had been misclassified as a star previously,” said Yale University astrophysicist Priyamvada Natarajan, who was not involved in the study.
The research was published in the journal Nature Astronomy.
