The brightest and most massive black hole ever discovered

The brightest object ever discovered has been spotted in the distant universe.

It's a quasar, the bright heart of a galaxy that gets its energy from a massive black hole about 17 billion times the mass of our sun.

The strength of the object, known as J0529-4351, was confirmed by observations made by the Very Large Telescope in Chile.

J0529-4351 has actually been recorded in the data for several years but its true glory has only just been recognized.

“It's surprising that it has remained unknown until today, when we already know about a million less impressive quasars. It has been literally staring us in the face until now,” said Christopher Onken, an astronomer from the Australian National University. (ANU) Operates on VLT notes.

The term quasar is used to describe a galaxy with a very active, energetic core. The black hole at the center of this galaxy is pulling matter toward itself at an amazing rate.

As this material accelerates around the hole, it gets torn apart and emits an enormous amount of light, so much so that even a distant object like J0529-4351 is still visible to us.

The emission from this quasar took 12 billion years to reach detectors in the VLT.

Everything about the object is amazing.

Participating scientists say the energy released makes the quasar 500 trillion times more luminous than the Sun.

“All of this light comes from a hot accretion disk that is seven light-years in diameter. This must be the largest accretion disk in the universe,” said Samuel Lai, a doctoral student at the Australian National University and co-author.

Seven light years is about 15,000 times the distance from the Sun to Neptune's orbit.