The brightest, most luminous objects in the entire Universe are neither stars nor galaxies, but quasars, like S5 0014+81. The sixth brightest quasar known so far, its mass was determined in a 2009 study: 40 billion Suns. Its physical size would have a radius that’s 800 times the Earth-Sun distance, or over 100 billion kilometers. This makes it the most massive black hole known in the entire Universe, as massive as the Triangulum galaxy, our local group’s third largest member. It shines so brightly because large amounts of matter are falling into the center via an accretion disk, getting accelerated and producing light. This object is known as a blazar, the brightest class of all active galaxies with supermassive black holes. A combination of supernovae, direct collapse black holes, and rapidly merging components could lead to a black hole so young and massive.
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