Scientists find what might be the brightest object in existence

Sign up to our free weekly IndyTech newsletter delivered straight to your inbox Sign up to our free IndyTech newsletter Sign up to our free IndyTech newsletter SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. The black hole powering this distant quasar is more than 17 billion times more immense than our sun, an Australian-led team said. Illustration provided by the European Southern Observatory in February 2024, depicts the record-breaking quasar J059-4351 Scientists have catalogued around a million quasars already. The rotating disk around the quasar’s black hole — the luminous swirling gas and other matter from gobbled-up stars — is like a cosmic hurricane. The findings are reported in a new study, ‘The accretion of a solar mass per day by a 17-billion solar mass black hole’, published in Nature Astronomy.