He European Southern Observatory (ESO) who reported discoveries made with the world’s largest and most sophisticated telescope, the Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile.

They called the discovery “not only the brightest object of its kind, but also the brightest object ever observed.”

Quasars are very distant and very bright objects in the universe. According to Great Norwegian Lexicon strongly suggests that quasars are the result of supermassive black holes at the centers of active galaxies capturing matter from around them. The extremely powerful radiation comes from matter outside the black hole, which heats up dramatically as it moves toward the black hole.

Watch the video: NASA shares “photo of cosmic beauty”

17 billion times larger than the Sun

This quasar contains a giant black hole at its center and shines 500,000 billion times brighter than the Sun. Its mass is also 17 billion times greater than the Sun.

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This quasar, named J0529-4351, is growing so fast that the black hole is devouring the equivalent of one sun a day, according to ESO.

– This makes it the brightest object in the known universe, said astronomer Christian Wolf, from the Australian National University (ANU) in a press release.

At first thought it was a star

Astrophysicist Jens Fynbo told Danish news agency Ritzau that all quasars are black holes, but not all black holes are quasars.

– The bigger the black hole, the faster the objects falling into it, so the brighter it is, he told Ritzau.

The object was first discovered in 1980, but was then thought to be a star and only last year was it concluded to be a quasar. The object is so far from Earth that it takes 12 billion light years for its light to reach us.