A mind-boggling look at what might be the brightest object in the universe

Read the Full Transcript

• John Yang:

  And finally, tonight, what could be the brightest known object in the universe, estimated by scientists to be emitting light, that's a mind boggling 500 trillion times more intense than the sun.

  According to a paper published this past week in the journal Nature Astronomy, it's a quasar produced by a massive and voracious black hole that devoured the equivalent of one of Earth's suns every day, a cosmic Star Destroyer.

  Quasars are whirlpools of matter being sucked into black holes swirling like waters circling a drain. The light is the result of the glowing heat created by the friction of all that matter rubbing together. The black hole at the center of this quasar is more than 17 billion times more massive than our Sun, which itself accounts for 99.8 percent of all our solar systems mass.

  Christian Wolf of the Australian National University have a study's lead author says it's the most violent place in the known universe. And it's so far, far away that the light scientists are studying now took 12 billion years to reach Earth. And the black hole stopped growing a long time ago.