Something billions of times brighter than the Sun was detected
The Sun is measured to be approximately 1.989E30 kg (or about 2,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 kg), while Earth is measured to be 5.972E24 kg, so it is amazing to find objects in space a few times larger than the Sun, which is astronomical. But an object detected by an international team of researchers recently was reported to be 12 billion times larger than the Sun–CBS.
The study was led by Xue-Bing Wu with the Kavli Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics, and Peking University. The paper was submitted to the journal Nature, and published 25 February.
First reported by Astronomy Now, it is considered the brightest quasar found in the early universe. Quasars are enormous black holes that are located at the center of distant galaxies. They accumulate matter from nearby materials, and also are known for releasing a large amount of gravitational energy.
The phenomena are measured by how much light is emitted that reaches Earth which is stretched out by an expanding universe. Known as the SDSS J0100+2802, it is believed to have formed 900 million years following the Big Bang, and located roughly 12.8 billion light-years from Earth.
There are only 40 known quasars that have a redshift above 6 (which is the displacement of spectral lines toward what are longer wavelengths, or the red-end of the spectrum in relation to radiation from distant galaxies), marking the start of early universe. This particular quasar is 420 trillion times brighter than the Sun.
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