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Related: About this forumBrightest 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 artists 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 doesnt 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 galaxys 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/
tclambert
(11,084 posts)Sure, quasars sound cool, but you wouldn't want to live next door to one.
Springslips
(533 posts)When we look into space we are also looking back into time. We see the galaxy as it was 13-billion years ago. By now all the stars we see from it have long ago died and created new stars; the quasar itself has went cold billions of year ago. So life as we know it couldn't life there, nor could even exist at that time as the heavy elements that make life have yet to appear.
Orsino
(37,428 posts)12.5 billion years ago.