Brightest and hungriest black hole ever detected::Astronomers report an object that shines with a brightness equivalent to 500 trillion suns.

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    59 months ago

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    Scientists, reporting in the journal Nature Astronomy, say the black hole has a voracious appetite, consuming the mass equivalent to one Sun every day.

    "We have discovered an object which has previously not been recognised for what it is; it’s been staring into our eyes for many years because it’s been glowing at its brightness for longer than humankind has probably existed.

    But we’ve now recognised it, not as being one of the many foreground stars in our Milky Way but as a very distant object," Christian Wolf, from the Australian National University (ANU), told BBC News.

    This quasar’s emission has taken a staggering 12 billion years to reach the detectors at the VLT, a European Southern Observatory organisation.

    In fact, it may even be possible that all galaxies form around these supermassive black holes," ANU PhD student and co-author Samuel Lai said.

    This is leading scientists to consider a scenario in which the objects grew directly out of the gas that existed just after the Big Bang, perhaps even before the first stars formed.


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