By Abigail O’Leary Scientists have spotted the brightest object ever at over 500 trillion times more luminous than the Sun. Using the European Southern Observatory’s (ESO) Very Large Telescope (VLT), astronomers have characterised a bright quasar, finding it to be not only the brightest of its kind, but also the most luminous object observed. The quasar, called J0529-4351, is so far away from Earth that its light took over 12 billion years to reach us. Quasars are the bright cores of distant galaxies and they are powered by supermassive black holes. The black hole in this record-breaking quasa…