Brightest Galaxy Yet Shines With Light of 300 Trillion Suns
Brightest Galaxy Yet Shines With Light of 300 Trillion Suns
A gigantic quasar creates a beacon that can be seen across the cosmos.
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WISE J224607.57-052635.0, seen here in an artist’s illustration, holds the record for brightest galaxy in the universe, shining with light equivalent to more than 300 trillion sun-like stars.
Illustration by NASA
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By Michael D. Lemonick, National Geographic
PUBLISHED May 26, 2015
Even in a cosmos that contains 100 billion galaxies or more, one of them has to be the brightest, and astronomers may have found a winner.
The newly identified galaxy, WISE J224607.57-052635.0, lurks at the very edge of the visible universe and shines with as much light as more than 300 trillion sun-like stars.
Starlight doesn’t cause most of the brightness from this faraway galaxy. Instead, the light almost certainly comes from a “monster quasar,” says co-discoverer Peter Eisenhardt, an astronomer at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). From Earth, a quasar can look like a star, but it is really a gigantic black hole that sits in a galaxy’s core and sucks in gas so voraciously that the stuff heats up to millions of degrees, creating a beacon that can be seen from across the universe.
The quasar in the newly found galaxy weighs 10 billion times the mass of the sun, researchers report in the June issue of the Astrophysical Journal.
More:
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2015/05/150526-astronomy-brightest-galaxy-quasar-universe/
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