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Astronomers have discovered a black hole that absorbs the equivalent of one sun per day. “We have discovered the fastest growing black hole known to date. It has a mass of seventeen billion suns,” said astronomer Christian Wolf of the Australian National University, and lead author of the study published in Nature.
A black hole’s activity is invisible by definition, but it illuminates the core of the galaxy in which it resides. According to Wolf, a Very Large Telescope from the European Southern Observatory ESO discovered the quasar, the bright core of the black hole. “That is the brightest known object in the entire universe,” says the astronomer.
Light from J0529-4351, the scientific name for the black hole, took 12 billion years to reach the VLT’s instruments. The researchers deduce from this that it would be about 13.8 billion years old. The light from J0529-4351 was already discovered in the 1980s, but then the Gaia satellite classified it as a very bright star.
Last year, researchers at the Australian Siding Spring Observatory, using the VLT’s X-shooter, identified the phenomenon as a quasar. The black hole attracts a large amount of matter and accelerates it. As a result, the quasar emits a gigantic amount of light, comparable to that of more than 500 billion suns.
