BRIGHTEST QUASAR

Scientists have discovered the energetic core of a distant galaxy that shatters the record for the brightest object in the early universe, blazing with the light equivalent to 600 trillion suns. Reaserchers identified the object- a black hole powered object- called a quasar among the universe's brightest inhabitants. The quasar is 12.8 billion light-years away, and it shines at the heart of a forming galaxy during an early part of the universe's history called the epoch of reionization, when the first stars and galaxies began to burn away a haze of neutral hydrogen across the cosmos. The quasar gets its brightness from a supermassive black hole: material from a disk of gas surrounding the black hole falls in, leading to blasts of energy at many different wavelengths. The quasar likely blazed when the universe was less than a billion years old, but some of its light is only now reaching Earth. According to the new observation the black hole powering the quasar is several hundred million times the mass of the sun. Despite it's intense brightness, the distance to the quasar is so great that it wouldn't have been visible but for a process called gravitational lensing, where light from the quasar has bent around a galaxy in between the object and Earth, magnifying our view. The quasar appears three times as large and fifty times as bright as it would have otherwise. Learning more about this quasar, which appears to be producing 10,000 stars per year, can teach researchers more about this distant but pivotal time in history, when the first stars and galaxies were kindling and shaping the universe to what we know today