What is the most interesting astronomical object in the universe?

 For example, the quasar J0529-4351, one of the brightest objects in the Universe.

It is located 12 billion light-years away and contains a supermassive black hole with a mass of 17 billion Suns. It has an accretion disk about 7 light-years across and is (or was) one of the most active black holes in the Universe, consuming a star every day and making its accretion disk shine 500 trillion times brighter than the Sun or 2,500 times brighter than the Milky Way. Matter orbiting it reaches relativistic speeds of 100,000 kilometers per second, or 1/3 c.

It is so far away and its light has traveled so far that it is possibly a quiet galaxy today with a supermassive black hole that does not devour any stars, although it would take 12 billion years to verify this.

What are some examples of astronomical objects?

 

We just discovered a new type of astronomical object. A galaxy in which gas outshines the stars it contains

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A billion years after the Big Bang, or 12.7 billion years ago, the universe was different than it is now. There were less heavy elements in nebulas from which new stars form. These atomic nuclei come to be in subsequent generations of stars that die as supernovas or, more calmly, spreading them around. At such a young age, the universe wasn’t old enough for many generations of stars to live and die. However, such gas nebulas that were heavy nuclei-poor allowed more massive and luminous stars to form than it is possible now. They lived short lives, exploded as supernovas, and illuminated nearby space and gas in young galaxies.

It turns out that one galaxy called 9422, 12.7 billion years ago, was unique because it had so many massive stars at once that they bombarded nebulas so much with their light that the gas in them shone more intensely than the stars themselves. These gigantic suns had temperatures of about 80,000 C/140,000 F. In comparison, the most massive stars in the contemporary universe have only temperatures around 45,000 C/80,000 F.

Gas shining more intensely than stars in young galaxies was already predicted in our models of the young universe, and this lucky discovery confirms our models. At 1 billion years old, galaxy 9422 doesn’t contain the very first stars called Population III anymore, which would be made almost entirely by hydrogen and helium that the universe was born with. The hot stars it contains are already some of the earliest, but subsequent generations formed from some ashes of earlier stars.

The fascinating discovery would not have been possible without the James Webb Telescope, which gives us an unprecedented view of the very old universe just after the Big Bang.