Quasar

Nowadays, the Milky Way is a pretty quiet galaxy – but just a few million years ago its central black hole sent off huge flares of radiation.

Astronomers have spotted an event that was thought to happen over millennia play out in a matter of months, as a usually-quiet galaxy suddenly fired up into an energetic quasar – and not just once, but in six different cases.

To look through space is to look through time. Astronomers on a 5-years survey have turned up 100 supermassive black holes from a time when they were thought to be rare, suggesting we might need to rewrite our understanding of their evolution.

The Sun is a mere 10-watt bulb compared to quasars, extremely luminous galactic cores that shine so intensely thanks to their ravenous hunger for nearby material. Now, astronomers have detected the brightest quasar ever found, shining with the light of almost 600 trillion Suns.

The galaxy W2246-0526 sits 12.4 billion light-years from Earth – almost the entire radius of the observable universe – and is the most luminous galaxy ever discovered, with the brightness of 350 trillion Suns. Now, astronomers have found that W2246-0526 is cannibalizing three neighboring galaxies.

Quantum entanglement is an eerie concept that Einstein himself had trouble accepting, and yet it’s been experimentally demonstrated. To find out whether there are other variables, a new experiment provides the strongest evidence so far of quantum entanglement or a 12-billion year “conspiracy."

Ordinary (or baryonic) matter is relatively rare in the universe, and there seems to be a huge chunk of it missing. After 20 years of scouring the sky, astronomers using the ESA’s XMM-Newton observatory have now found clues to this missing matter hiding in intergalactic gas.

Astronomers at Australian National University have spotted a black hole so bright that were it in our home galaxy, it would outshine all the stars in the sky. This supermassive monster also happens to be the fastest-growing black hole ever seen, devouring the equivalent of the Sun every two days.

At a distance of about 13 billion lightyears, the most distant supermassive black hole known so far has been spotted. That incredible distance means it dates back to when the first stars blinked on, which raises the question of how a black hole that big arose so soon after the universe began.

The brightest galaxy ever discovered may be in the process of tearing itself apart. WISE J224607.57-052635.0 (W2246-0526) is believed to be brighter than 300 trillion Suns, however the supermassive black hole at the centre of the galaxy could also be responsible for a drastic transformation.

A team of scientists from China and Arizona have spotted the brightest quasar from the early universe, centered on a black hole 12.8 billion light years away and as bright as 420 trillion suns.

Astronomers using the Very Large Telescope (VLT) have discovered an alignment of supermassive black holes located billions of light-years apart. The team delved deeper, finding that the quasars aren’t just linked to each other, but are also aligned with the large-scale structure of the Universe.