It devours material proportional to the Earth in a second.
Astronomers have discovered a supermassive black hole that grows faster for all others identified so far. According to Space.com, the giant's mass is three billion solar masses, and the speed at which it absorbs matter is forcing it to grow incredibly fast.
Other black holes of this size stopped growing billions of years ago. But a recently discovered facility continues to do so. It is now 500 times larger than Sagittarius A *, a supermassive black hole in the center of the Milky Way.
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Based on these data, scientists have concluded that this object is the fastest growing black hole of all that has existed for the last nine billion years and has been discovered so far. Now researchers want to find out why the black hole is still growing. It is likely that this led to the collision of two galaxies, which led to the emergence of a huge amount of material capable of feeding the object.
This rapid accretion of matter to the surface of a black hole has also caused the quasar to emit enough energy to make it 7,000 times brighter than the light from each star in the Milky Way. According to researchers, this is the brightest quasar in the last two thirds of the universe's existence.
The brightness of the quasar is 14.5 magnitudes. This means that it is only slightly dimmer than Pluto, and observers with good telescopes can see it in the night sky. But despite the brightness of the quasar, scientists describe the discovery as “a very large, unexpected needle in a haystack.”
Astronomers have been hunting for such objects for more than 50 years. They found thousands of dimmer ones, but this surprisingly bright one slipped away unnoticed, “said lead author Christopher Onken of the Australian National University. Earlier, a group of scientists from the University of California, Berkeley said that a black rogue hole that roams the Milky Way alone may be the least known at the moment.
