NEW DELHI: Astronomers have discovered the fastest-growing black hole ever recorded -- the most luminous known object in the universe that is devouring the equivalent of one Sun every day.
The researchers at The Australian National University (ANU) noted that the quasar with a black hole at its heart with a mass roughly 17 billion times that of the Sun, has set a record that may not ever be beaten.
"The incredible rate of growth also means a huge release of light and heat," said study lead author Christian Wolf, Associate Professor at ANU.
"So, this is also the most luminous known object in the universe. It is 500 trillion times brighter than our sun," Wolf said in a statement.
A black hole is a region of spacetime where gravity is so strong that nothing, including light, can escape it.
Christopher Onken, co-author of the study published in the journal Nature Astronomy, noted that it was a surprise that the blackhole remained undetected until now, given what we know about many other, less impressive ones.
The European Southern Observatory had spotted the object, J0529-4351, during a 1980 sky survey, but it was thought to be a star. It was not identified as a quasar — the extremely active and luminous core of a galaxy — until last year. Observations by telescopes in Australia and Chile’s Atacama Desert later clinched it.
“The exciting thing about this quasar is that it was hiding in plain sight and was misclassified as a star previously,” Yale University's Priyamvada Natarajan, who was not involved in the study, said in an email to the Associated Press.
"In the adolescent universe, matter was moving chaotically and feeding hungry black holes. Today, stars are moving orderly at safe distances and only rarely plunge into black holes," Webster said.
The intense radiation comes from the accretion disc -- made of rapidly rotating gas -- around the black hole, which is the holding pattern for all the material waiting to be devoured, the researchers said.
"It looks like a gigantic and magnetic storm cell with temperatures of 10,000 degrees Celsius, lightning everywhere and winds blowing so fast they would go around Earth in a second," Wolf said.
"This storm cell is seven light years across, which is 50 per cent more than the distance from our solar system to the next star in the Galaxy, alpha Centauri," he added.
Later observations and computer modeling have determined that the quasar is gobbling up the equivalent of 370 suns a year — roughly one a day. Further analysis shows the mass of the black hole to be 17 to 19 billion times that of our sun, according to the team. More observations are needed to understand its growth rate.
The quasar is 12 billion light-years away and has been around since the early days of the universe. A light-year is 5.8 trillion miles.
(With PTI and AP inputs)