An international team of astronomers, including some from Yale, have found the brightest thing ever detected in the universe. How bright? It shines with the light of 600 trillion suns.
It’s called a quasar. Scientists spotted the first ones in the 1950s.
“So basically, a quasar is a supermassive black hole, and it’s usually found at the center of galaxies,” said Fabio Pacucci, a researcher at Yale University.
“And if large amounts of mass is falling onto black holes, then they start to shine. The black hole at the center is so bright, it basically outshines all the light of the other stars in the galaxy.”
We’d never seen this particular quasar before because it’s so far away – nearly 13 billion light years.
“The discovery of this quasar was almost serendipitous, meaning that we were very lucky to find it,” Pacucci said.
Scientists took advantage of a phenomenon first discovered by Albert Einstein called gravitational lensing. That light passed through a small galaxy on its 13 billion-year journey from the quasar to us.
“This galaxy is acting like a magnifying glass. It increases the apparent brightness of the source, and allows us to actually see farther away sources.”
This quasar could teach us a lot about the early universe. When we look far off into space, we’re also looking back into time. So this quasar appears to us as it looked not that long after the Big Bang, 13 billion years ago.
“So if we are right, this could have very important implications in the development of the early universe.”
Pacucci says there could be a lot more of these quasars out there, waiting to be found. And they could shine a lot of light on the early years of the cosmos.
