NASA astronomers have discovered a remote galaxy that shines with the light of more than 300 trillion suns, making it the most luminous galaxy ever found, U.S. space agency NASA said in a statement.
Detected with the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) telescope, the galaxy WISE J224607.57-052635.0 belongs to a recently discovered new class of objects called extremely luminous infrared galaxies.
The scientists believe that the brilliant galaxy may have a behemoth black hole at its heart, which is the reason for its dazzling light.
"Supermassive black holes draw gas and matter into a disk around them, heating the disk to roaring temperatures of millions of degrees and blasting out high-energy, visible, ultraviolet, and X-ray light," the space agency explained in a statement.
The light, however, is absorbed by surrounding dust cocoons, which heat up and radiate infrared light.
Since light from the luminous galaxy has traveled 12.5 billion years to reach us, astronomers are seeing the object as it was in the distant past, NASA said.
Even back then, our universe was only a tenth of its present age of 13.8 billion years but its black hole was already billions of times the mass of our sun.
Immense black holes are common at the cores of galaxies, but finding one this big so “far back” in the cosmos is rare.
The new study, published in the Astrophysical Journal, also reported 19 other extremely luminous infrared galaxies.
It wasn’t possible to discover them before due to large distance and the dust, converting their visible light into an incredible outpouring of infrared light.
