Bright VS. Dark
Light
Dark
The darkest object in the universe is a black hole. They are places in space where gravity is so strong that light can not escape. This occurs because so much mass is squeezed into such a small space. The smallest black hole can be as big as an atom and have as much mass as a large mountain. On the other hand, the largest black holes can be the diameter of the solar system and have more than one million suns worth of mass in them.
The brightest thing in the universe is a quasar (or blazar). There are many therioes of what quasars are, and the most well known and accepted one is that they are formed from massive black holes. When a lot of matter is eaten by a black hole, the matter starts to spin at speeds we cannot truly fathom, and an accretion disk is formed. As the matter moves faster it heats up and forms a quasar.
Apparent Magnitude
VS.
Absolute Magnitude
Apparent magnitude is what an object looks like to your eye at that moment. For example, an light bulb that is one inch from your eye will look brighter than the sun.
But, if you were to use absolute magnitude you would find that the sun is one septillion (A one with 24 zero's after it.) times brighter than the light bulb. Absolute magnitude is what an object looks like around 32 light years away.
The 100,000th Picture Taken By The Hubble Telescope
These two objects appear to be right next to each other... Actually, one is a quasar that is 9 billion light years away. That means that it was alive 9 billion years ago, and the light that it produced is just reaching us now. The other object is a galaxy 7 billion light years away.