"Brightest Object In Known Universe" Puffs Itself Up To Look 15 Times Its Actual Size

The discovery resolves one major mystery in cosmology, deepens another and heralds the dawn of a new era for telescope capacity.

Stephen Luntz

Edited
by
Katy Evans



Artist's impression of a quasar caused by a supermassive black hole in the early universe of the kind that has just been found to be smaller than previously thought.
Image Credit: NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/J. da Silva/M. Zamani

Agiant supermassive black hole (SMBH) that consumes the mass of the Sun a day has been found to be about one-fifteenth of its initially estimated size, which makes its rate of feeding even more inexplicable. As excited as astronomers are about solving one puzzle and having another made clearer, they’re even more enthused about the potential of the technology that made this finding possible.

The JWST keeps turning up objects in the distant universe we can’t explain, and one of the oddest is J0529-4351. This is a quasar, an immensely bright accretion disk powered by a supermassive black hole (SMBH). When discovered last year, astronomers described it as the “Brightest object in the known universe”, although a challenger emerged later that year.

Initial observations of J0529 (as it’s now called) indicated it is almost certainly 3-4 times as bright as any previously identified quasar, and 200 trillion times brighter than the Sun. It was also thought to have a mass about 17 billion times that of the Sun.

Both these aspects represented puzzles for astronomers. On the one hand, there was the question of how such luminosity was possible. Quasar brightness is determined by the speed at which the SMBH is consuming matter, and this seemed impossibly fast. On the other hand, there was the question of how a black hole could have reached such an enormous size so soon after the Big Bang. We’re seeing J0529 as it was around 2 billion years after the universe formed, and our models of black hole formation can’t explain how something could get so big, so fast, even feeding at that rate.

More:
https://www.iflscience.com/brightest-object-in-known-universe-puffs-itself-up-to-look-15-times-its-actual-size-80955