Astronomers have identified a supermassive black hole which absorbs the equivalent of a sun per day. The black hole is at the heart of the “quasar’ – the nucleus of the galaxy which shelters it.
The light from this quasar took 12 billion years to reach the VLT instruments, which makes it possible to date its existence to the primitive epoch of the Universe – 13.8 billion years old. “We have discovered the fastest growing black hole known to date. It has a mass of 17 billion suns and 'eats' a little more than one sun perday,” Christian Wolf, an astronomer at the Australian National University, reported in the journal Nature.