Astronomers at The Australian National University discovered the fastest growing black hole in the last 9 billion years.
The black hole is 7,000 times brighter than the light from our own galaxy and consumes the equivalent of one Earth per second.
It was described as a "very large, unexpected needle in the haystack" by the lead researcher.
Astronomers have been looking for objects like this for a long time. They have found thousands of fainter ones, but this one had slipped through the cracks.
Three billion suns make up the black hole. Billions of years ago, others of a similar size stopped growing fast.
We want to know why this one is different. The black hole might have been fed by two big galaxies crashing into each other.
The co-author of the book said that he doesn't believe we will find another black hole like this.
We're pretty sure this record won't be broken. We have run out of places to hide.
There is a measure of how bright an object appears to an observer on Earth.
Anyone with a good telescope can see it.
The black hole in our own galaxy is 500 times bigger than this one.
All of the planets in our solar system are inside the black hole's event horizon.
As part of the SkyMapper project, there was a discovery.
The research was published to the arXiv pre-print server and sent to the Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia.
More information: Christopher A. Onken et al, Discovery of the most luminous quasar of the last 9 Gyr. arXiv:2206.04204v1 [astro-ph.GA], arxiv.org/abs/2206.04204
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