NASA announced Thursday the discovery of the most luminous galaxy, with light equivalent to more than 300 trillion suns.
The galaxy, says the US space agency in a statement, belongs to a new class of celestial bodies recently discovered by WISE infrared telescope, the “extremely luminous infrared galaxies”.
The galaxy, cataloged as WISE J224607.57-052635.0, may have a black hole at its center, which is rare in a distant galaxy like this.
Since the galaxy light traveled 12.5 thousand million years to reach the current time, astronomers see the body as it was in the distant past. The black hole would have a billion times the mass of the Sun when the universe was one-tenth of its present age, about 14 billion years.
“We are observing a lot of intense phase of galaxy evolution,” said Chao-Wei Tsai, NASA, and lead author of the study, which is published on Friday in The Astrophysical Journal.
According to the astronomer, “the dazzling light” the galaxy can be derived from the action of a black hole ‘supermassive’.
Holes ‘supermassive’ attract gas and matter to an accretion disk around it, about to heat up to temperatures of millions of degrees and cause release visible light, ultraviolet and X-rays. The light is blocked by “cocoons” dust, which, when warm, emanating infrared radiation.
As the black hole in question has become so gigantic remains an unknown to the authors of the research.
The study reports 20 new “extremely luminous infrared galaxies”, including the brightest galaxy detected so far.
These galaxies were found previously due to its distance and because the dust makes its visible light into infrared radiation, not visible.
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