NASA has discovered a galaxy that gives off light with an intensity of 300 trillion suns. Never before has a galaxy been discovered that emits such intense light. The observations were made with light that took 12.5 billion years to reach Earth.
According to the space agency, the galaxy has been given the unappealing name WISE J224607.57-052635.0. WISE stands for the space telescope that made the discovery: the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer. According to NASA calculations, the galaxy radiates light with an intensity comparable to 300 trillion times the intensity of our sun.
NASA thinks that a black hole in the galaxy is the cause of the high light intensity. It attracts gas and matter, which are in a cloud around the black hole. When they come together, the temperature rises to millions of degrees Celsius and therefore light is emitted. That light is then blocked by surrounding dust clouds, but they are heated up as a result, and therefore start to emit infrared light themselves. This is eventually captured by NASA’s scanners.
The light intensity is so high that NASA has had to define a new category for such galaxies. Galaxies like WISE J224607.57-052635.0 now fall into a category called extremely luminous infrared galaxies. A number of others have already been discovered that are also allowed to carry this label.
It took a whopping 12.5 billion years for the light observed by the WISE space telescope to reach Earth. As a result, the system appears to have evolved early in the universe’s existence. According to NASA, the observations make it clear that some black holes were larger than previously thought possible at their “conception”.
A visual impression of what the galaxy should look like.