The brightest object in the universe is a black hole that eats a star a day Premium

Scientists have found a black hole surrounded by the largest and brightest disc of captive matter ever discovered.

Scientists have no reported evidence of the true conditions in Hell, perhaps because no one has ever returned to tell the tale. Hell has been imagined as a supremely uncomfortable place, hot and hostile to bodily forms of human life.

Thanks to a huge astronomical survey of the entire sky, we have now found what may be the most hellish place in the universe.

In a new paper in Nature Astronomy, we describe a black hole surrounded by the largest and brightest disc of captive matter ever discovered. The object, called J0529-4351, is therefore also the brightest object found so far in the universe.

Astronomers have already found around one million fast-growing supermassive black holes across the universe, the kind that sit at the centres of galaxies and are as massive as millions or billions of Suns.

To grow rapidly, they pull stars and gas clouds out of stable orbits and drag them into a ring of orbiting material called an accretion disc. Once there, very little material escapes; the disc is a mere holding pattern for material that will soon be devoured by the black hole.

The disc is heated by friction as the material in it rubs together. Pack in enough material and the glow of the heat gets so bright that it outshines thousands of galaxies and makes the black hole’s feeding frenzy visible to us on Earth, more than 12 billion light years away.

The accretion disc of J0529-4351 emits light that is 500 trillion times more intense than that of our Sun. Such a staggering amount of energy can only be released if the black hole eats about a Sun worth of material every day.