Brightest Galaxy Yet Shines With Light of 300 Trillion Suns
A gigantic quasar creates a beacon that can be seen across the cosmos.
Even in a cosmos that contains 100 billion galaxies or more, one of them has to be the brightest, and astronomers may have found a winner.
The newly identified galaxy, WISE J224607.57-052635.0, lurks at the very edge of the visible universe and shines with as much light as more than 300 trillion sunlike stars.
Starlight doesn’t cause most of the brightness from this faraway galaxy. Instead, the light almost certainly comes from a “monster quasar,” says co-discoverer Peter Eisenhardt, an astronomer at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). From Earth, a quasar can look like a star, but it is really a gigantic black hole that sits in a galaxy’s core and sucks in gas so voraciously that
