By Harry Baker published about 2 hours ago
It is so massive and bright that amateur astronomers can see it from Earth.
Astronomers have detected the brightest and fastest-growing black hole to have existed in the last 9 billion years. The enormous cosmic entity is 3 billion times more massive than the sun and swallows up an Earth-size chunk of matter every second.
The new supermassive black hole, known as J1144, is around 500 times as Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the heart of the Milky Way, which was recently photographed for the first time. A ring of superhot plasma around the enormous void also emits around 7,000 times more light than our entire galaxy.
Australian astronomers discovered the cosmic juggernaut using data from Australian National University's SkyMapper Southern Sky Survey, which aims to map out the entirety of the sky in the Southern Hemisphere. Locating the supermassive black hole was like finding a "very large, unexpected needle in the haystack," the researchers said in a statement(opens in new tab).
"Astronomers have been hunting for objects like this for more than 50 years," lead researcher Christopher Onken, an astronomer at the Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra, said in the statement. "They have found thousands of fainter ones, but this astonishingly bright one had slipped through unnoticed."
More:
https://www.livescience.com/fastest-growing-black-hole-discovered
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