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The accretion of a solar mass per day by a 17-billion solar mass black hole

Nature Astronomy volume 8, pages 520–529 (2024)Cite this article

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Abstract

Around a million quasars have been catalogued in the Universe by probing deeper and using new methods for discovery. However, the hardest ones to find seem to be the rarest and brightest specimens. Here we study the properties of the most luminous of all quasars found so far. These have been overlooked until recently, which demonstrates that modern all-sky surveys have much to reveal. The black hole in this quasar accretes around one solar mass per day onto an existing mass of ∼17 billion solar masses. In this process, the accretion disk alone releases a radiative energy of 2 × 1041 W. If the quasar is not strongly gravitationally lensed, then its broad-line region is expected to have the largest physical and angular diameter occurring in the Universe and this will allow the Very Large Telescope Interferometer to image its rotation and measure its black-hole mass directly. This will be an important test for broad-line region size–luminosity relationships, whose extrapolation has underpinned common black-hole mass estimates at high redshift.

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Fig. 1: The exceptional quasar J0529−4351.
Fig. 2: J0529−4351 in relation to other quasars.
Fig. 3: Light curves of J0529−4351.
Fig. 4: Spectrum of the J0529−4351 from the ESO 8.2 m VLT.
Fig. 5: Results of the continuum fitting for J0529−4351 using Markov chain Monte Carlo and slim-disk models.

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Data availability

Data from Data Release 3 (DR3) of the European Space Agency’s Gaia mission are publicly available (https://gea.esac.esa.int/archive/). NASA ATLAS data are available from https://fallingstar-data.com/forcedphot/. The SkyMapper Southern Survey data are available from https://skymapper.anu.edu.au/ (https://doi.org/10.25914/5f14eded2d116). The raw spectrum and calibration files from the ESO/VLT are available in the ESO archive at http://archive.eso.org/. A reduced spectrum is available from the authors on reasonable request.

Code availability

The spectral fitting code and the quasar continuum-fitting code were written by S.L. in Python and are publicly available on GitHub at https://github.com/samlaihei/PyQSpecFit (ref. 38) and https://github.com/samlaihei/BADFit (ref. 48).

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the Australian Research Council (ARC) through Discovery Project DP190100252 (C.W., F.B., C.A.O. and S.L.). S.L. is grateful to the Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the Australian National University (ANU) for funding his Ph.D. studentship. We thank G. Ferrami from the University of Melbourne for discussing solutions for strong gravitational lensing. Data for this project were obtained at the European Southern Observatory through DDT proposal 2110.B-5032. This work has made use of data from the European Space Agency mission Gaia (https://www.cosmos.esa.int/gaia), processed by the Gaia Data Processing and Analysis Consortium (DPAC; https://www.cosmos.esa.int/web/gaia/dpac/consortium). Funding for the DPAC has been provided by national institutions, in particular, the institutions participating in the Gaia Multilateral Agreement. This publication makes use of data products from the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, which is a joint project of the University of California, Los Angeles, and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory/California Institute of Technology, and NEOWISE, which is a project of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory/California Institute of Technology. WISE and NEOWISE are funded by NASA. SuperCOSMOS Sky Survey material is based on photographic data originating from the UK, Palomar and ESO Schmidt telescopes and is provided by the Wide-Field Astronomy Unit, Institute for Astronomy, University of Edinburgh. This work made use of Astropy (http://www.astropy.org), a community-developed core Python package and an ecosystem of tools and resources for astronomy102. This research has made use of the SVO Filter Profile Service (http://svo2.cab.inta-csic.es/theory/fps/) supported from the Spanish MINECO through grant AYA2017-84089. The national facility capability for SkyMapper has been funded through ARC LIEF grant LE130100104 from the Australian Research Council, awarded to the University of Sydney, the ANU, Swinburne University of Technology, the University of Queensland, the University of Western Australia, the University of Melbourne, Curtin University of Technology, Monash University and the Australian Astronomical Observatory. SkyMapper is owned and operated by The ANU’s Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics. The survey data were processed and provided by the SkyMapper Team at ANU. The SkyMapper node of the All-Sky Virtual Observatory is hosted at the National Computational Infrastructure. Development and support of the SkyMapper node of the All-Sky Virtual Observatory has been funded in part by Astronomy Australia Limited and the Australian Government through the Commonwealth’s Education Investment Fund and the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy, in particular, the National eResearch Collaboration Tools and Resources and the Australian National Data Service Projects. This work uses data from the University of Hawaii’s ATLAS project, funded through NASA grants NN12AR55G, 80NSSC18K0284 and 80NSSC18K1575, with contributions from the Queen’s University Belfast, the Space Telescope Science Institute, the South African Astronomical Observatory and the Millennium Institute of Astrophysics, Chile.

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  1. Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics, Australian National University, Canberra, Australian Capital Territory, Australia

    Christian Wolf, Samuel Lai, Christopher A. Onken & Neelesh Amrutha

  2. Centre for Gravitational Astrophysics, Australian National University, Canberra, Australian Capital Territory, Australia

    Christian Wolf

  3. European Southern Observatory, Santiago, Chile

    Fuyan Bian

  4. School of Physics, University of Melbourne, Parkville, Victoria, Australia

    Wei Jeat Hon & Rachel L. Webster

  5. Sorbonne Universités, CNRS, UMR 7095, Institut d’Astrophysique de Paris, Paris, France

    Patrick Tisserand

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All authors contributed to data collection. S.L. led the data analysis with contributions from C.A.O. and C.W. C.W. selected the quasar candidates and led the drafting and editing of the paper.

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Correspondence to Christian Wolf.

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Wolf, C., Lai, S., Onken, C.A. et al. The accretion of a solar mass per day by a 17-billion solar mass black hole. Nat Astron 8, 520–529 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41550-024-02195-x

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