Scientists at ANU have found the fastest growing black hole in the space which they have described as a monster that swallows mass equivalent to our Sun every two days. The astronomers looked back more than 12 billion years to the early dark ages of the Universe when this supermassive black hole was estimated to be the size of about 20 billion suns. It showed a growth rate of one per cent every one million years.
The black hole that shines thousands of times brighter than an entire galaxy
According to the scientists at ANU, this black hole shines thousands of times brighter than an entire galaxy and if it would have been sitting at the centre of the Milky Way galaxy, it would have appeared 10 times brighter than a full moon.
This black hole is growing so rapidly that it's shining thousands of times more brightly than an entire galaxy, due to all of the gases it sucks in daily that causes lots of friction and heat.
Dr Wolf said the energy emitted from this newly discovered supermassive black hole, also known as a quasar, was mostly ultraviolet light but also radiated x-rays.
If we had this monster sitting at the centre of our Milky Way galaxy, it would appear 10 times brighter than a full moon. It would appear as an incredibly bright pin-point star that would almost wash out all of the stars in the sky.
Dr Wolf said as these kinds of black holes shine, they can be used as beacons to see and study the formation of elements in the early galaxies of the Universe.
"Scientists can see the shadows of objects in front of the supermassive black hole," he said.
Exceptional size of the black hole which is the fastest-growing
According to Dr Wolf, if this monstrous black hole was at the centre of the Milky Way it would likely make life on Earth impossible with the huge amounts of x-rays emanating from it.
These large and rapidly-growing blackholes are exceedingly rare, and we have been searching for them with SkyMapper for several months now. The European Space Agency's Gaia satellite, which measures tiny motions of celestial objects, helped us find this supermassive black hole.
The discovery of the new supermassive black hole was confirmed using the spectrograph on the ANU 2.3 metre telescope to split colours into spectral lines.
"We don't know how this one grew so large, so quickly in the early days of the Universe," Dr Wolf said. "The hunt is on to find even faster-growing black holes."
Dr Wolf said that instruments on very large ground-based telescopes being built over the next decade. It would be able to directly measure the expansion of the Universe using these very bright black holes.
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