Fastest-growing black hole ever seen is devouring the equivalent of 1 Earth per second

The mass of an entire Earth is being swallowed by the fastest growing black hole.

The giant black hole has a mass 3 billion times that of the sun and is growing fast because of its rapid consumption. The black hole sucks matter from a thin disk of gas and dust when it accretions.

Black holes of a similar size stopped growing billions of years ago, but this newly discovered black hole is still growing. It's 500 times larger than Sagittarius A*, the black hole at the center of the Milky Way, and would fit the entire solar system behind its event horizon.

Black holes eat stars.

The researchers determined that the new black hole is the fastest growing black hole in the past 9 billion years.

Christopher Onken is a researcher at the Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the Australian National University. The black hole may have been fed by a lot of material that crashed into it.

This rapid accretion of matter to the surface of the black hole has resulted in a quasar blasting out enough energy to make it 7,000 times brighter than the light from the stars in the sky. Around the past two-thirds of the universe's existence, this quasar is the most Luminous one.

The quasar is bright enough to be seen by skywatchers with good telescopes in a very dark area, even though it has a brightness of only 14.

The SkyMapper Southern Sky Survey was conducted by the 1.3 meter telescope at the Siding Spring Observatory in Australia.

The finding was described by Onken and his team as a very large, unexpected needle in the haystack.

Astronomers have been looking for objects like this for a long time. Thousands of fainter ones have been found, but this bright one had slipped through unnoticed.

Christian Wolf, an associate professor at ANU and a member of the research team, said that he doesn't think astronomer will find another black hole growing at this rate or power a quasar of this magnitude or greater.

Wolf said that objects like this could be hiding. We are pretty sure this record won't be broken.

The paper detailing the discovery has not yet been peer reviewed. The arXiv database has a preprints version.

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