Astronomers find brightest object in universe
The brightest object in the universe has been discovered by a University of Washington astronomer and his colleagues, the UW announced June 5. Given the unglamorous name “APM08279+5255,” the quasar is 4 million-billion to 5 million-billion times brighter than the sun and outshines the brightest galaxy by more than 100 times. Located in the northern constellation of Lynx, near Ursa Major, it is invisible to the naked eye, but can be seen through modest telescopes.
Geraint Lewis, a postdoctoral researcher at the UW, along with his collaborators, made the discovery by accident while taking measurements at a Canary Islands observatory. The team was observing stars in the halo of our galaxy when an extremely bright object showed up in one observation. “It was actually a serendipitous discovery, as the best discoveries often are,” Lewis says
Its record-breaking brightness actually comes from two different sources. Light in the ultraviolet and optical range comes from a disk surrounding a supermassive black hole. Matter attracted by the black hole’s gravity generates energy as it is torn apart and falls toward the black hole. The second source of brightness, in the infrared portion of the spectrum, comes from thick dust heated by radiation from the center of the quasar.
Quasars are some of the most energetic objects observed in the universe. Each quasar generates more energy than the rest of a galaxy’s stars combined. This quasar is estimated to be 11 billion light years from Earth.
Ultimately, information from quasars helps astronomers develop a more accurate picture of the universe’s origins and its structure. Lewis’ co-discoverers include Michael Irwin of the Royal Greenwich Observatory, Rodrigo lbata of the European Southern Observatory in Munich, and Edward Totten of Queens University, Belfast.