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Brightest quasar ever found shines with the intensity of 600 trillion Suns


beecee

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https://newatlas.com/brightest-quasar-600-trillion-suns/58020/

From our point of view here on Earth, the brightest object in the sky is unquestionably the Sun. But this unremarkable star is a mere 10-watt bulb compared to quasars, extremely luminous galactic cores that shine so intensely thanks to their ravenous hunger for nearby material. Now, astronomers have detected the brightest quasar ever found, shining with the light of almost 600 trillion Suns.

The quasar, officially designated J043947.08+163415.7, pips the previous brightness records by a fair margin. Until now the title belonged to a quasar shining with the equivalent of 420 trillion Suns, while the most luminous galaxy found so far is "only" as bright as 350 trillion...more at link

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the paper: 

http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/aaf86a

Most Lensed Quasars at z > 6 are Missed by Current Surveys: 

Abstract

The discovery of the first strongly lensed (μ ≈ 50) quasar at z > 6 (J0439+1634) represents a breakthrough in our understanding of the early universe. We derive the theoretical consequences of the new discovery. We predict that the observed population of z > 6 quasars should contain many sources with magnifications μ  10 and with image separations below the resolution threshold. Additionally, current selection criteria could have missed a substantial population of lensed z > 6 quasars, due to the contamination of the drop-out photometric bands by lens galaxies. We argue that this predicted population of lensed z > 6 quasars would be misclassified and mixed up with low-z galaxies. We quantify the fraction of undetected quasars as a function of the slope of the bright end of the quasar luminosity function, β. For β  3.6, we predict that the undetected lensed quasars could reach half of the population, whereas for β  4.5 the vast majority of the z > 6 quasar population is lensed and still undetected. This would significantly affect the z > 6 quasar luminosity function and inferred black hole mass distributions, with profound implications for the ultraviolet, X-ray, and infrared cosmic backgrounds and the growth of early quasars.

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