The object is an OVV quasar, a type of blazar. It belongs to the most energetic subclass of active galactic nuclei, which are produced by the rapid accretion of matter by a central supermassive black hole, changing gravitational energy to light energy that can be visible at cosmic distances. In the case of S5 0014+81, it is one of the most luminous quasars known, with a total luminosity of over 1041 watts, equal to an absolute bolometric magnitude of −31.5. If the quasar were at a distance of 280 light-years from Earth, it would give out as much energy per square meter as the Sun does at Earth, despite being 18 million times more distant. The quasar's luminosity is therefore about 3 × 1014 times the Sun, or over 25,000 times as luminous as all the 100 to 400 billion stars of the Milky Way Galaxy combined, making it one of the most powerful objects in the observable universe. However, because of its huge distance of 12.1 billion light-years it can only be studied by spectroscopy. The central black hole of the quasar devours an extremely huge amount of matter, equivalent to 4,000 solar masses of material every year. The quasar is also a very strong source of radiation, from gamma rays and X-rays down to radio waves. The quasar's designation, S5, is from the Fifth Survey of Strong Radio Sources, 0014+81 was its coordinates in epoch B1950.0. It also has the other designation 6C B0014+8120, from the Sixth Cambridge Survey of Radio Sources by the University of Cambridge. The host galaxy of S5 0014+81 is a giant ellipticalstarburst galaxy, with the apparent magnitude of 24.
The host galaxy of S5 0014+81 is an FSRQ blazar, a giant elliptical galaxy that hosts a supermassive black hole at its center. In 2009, a team of astronomers using the Swift spacecraft used the luminosity of S5 0014+81 to measure the mass of its black hole. They found it to be about 10,000 times more massive than the black hole at the center of our galaxy, or equivalent to 40 billion solar masses. This makes it one of the most massive black holes ever discovered, more than six times the value of the black hole of Messier 87, which was thought to be the largest black hole for almost 60 years, and was coined to be an "ultramassive" black hole. The Schwarzschild radius of this black hole is 118.35 billion kilometers, giving a diameter of 236.7 billion kilometers, 1,600 astronomical units, or about 40 times the radius of Pluto's orbit, and has a mass equivalent to four Large Magellanic Clouds. What is even more remarkable is that such a large black hole existed so early in the universe, at only 1.6 billion years after the Big Bang. This suggests that supermassive black holes formed very quickly. Evolution models based on the mass of S5 0014+81's supermassive black hole predict that it will live for roughly years, before it dissipates by the Hawking radiation.
