“The most luminous object ever detected has been spied in the distant universe,” according to BBC Feb. 20, 2024. A quasar, or active galactic nucleus, has been discovered in the Milky Way, powered by a gargantuan black hole 17 billion times the mass of our sun. The object, known as J0529-4351, has a voracious appetite, consuming the mass equivalent of one sun every day. The quasar’s emission has taken 12 billion years to reach the detectors at the Very Large Telescope in Chile. “The brightness of the quasar is equivalent to more than 500 trillion suns, and the hot accretion disc producing all that light measures seven light-years in diameter. All galaxies seem to have a supermassive object at their core, which may be intrinsic to the evolution of those galaxies,” said BBC. The puzzle is how some black holes got so big so early in the universe, leading scientists to consider a scenario where the objects grew directly out of gas just after the Big Bang.