ISLAMABAD – Scientists have discovered the fastest-growing black hole knownin the universe, describing it as a monster that devours a mass equivalentto our Sun every two days. The astronomers have looked back more than 12billion years to the early dark ages of the universe, when thissupermassive black hole was estimated to be the size of about 20 billionsuns with a one per cent growth rate every one million years.

“This black hole is growing so rapidly that it’s shining thousands of timesmore brightly than an entire galaxy, due to all of the gases it sucks indaily that cause lots of friction and heat,” said Christian Wolf fromAustralian National University (ANU). “If we had this monster sitting atthe centre of our Milky Way galaxy, it would appear 10 times brighter thana full moon. It would appear as an incredibly bright pin-point star thatwould almost wash out all of the stars in the sky,” said Wolf.

The energy emitted from this newly discovered supermassive black hole, alsoknown as a quasar, was mostly ultraviolet light but also radiatedx-rays. “Again, if this monster was at the centre of the Milky Way it wouldlikely make life on Earth impossible with the huge amounts of x-raysemanating from it,” he said. The SkyMapper telescope at the ANU SidingSpring Observatory detected this light in the near-infrared, as the lightwaves had red-shifted over the billions of light years to Earth.

“As the universe expands, space expands and that stretches the light wavesand changes their colour,” Wolf said. “These large and rapidly-growingblackholes are exceedingly rare, and we have been searching for them withSkyMapper for several months now. The European Space Agency’s Gaiasatellite, which measures tiny motions of celestial objects, helped us findthis supermassive black hole,” he said.

The Gaia satellite confirmed the object that they had found was sittingstill, meaning that it was far away and it was a candidate to be a verylarge quasar. The discovery of the new supermassive black hole wasconfirmed using the spectrograph on the ANU 2.3 metre telescope to splitcolours into spectral lines. “We don’t know how this one grew so large, soquickly in the early days of the Universe,” Wolf said.Wolf said as thesekinds of black holes shine, they can be used as beacons to see and studythe formation of elements in the early galaxies of the universe.

“Scientists can see the shadows of objects in front of the supermassiveblack hole,” he said. “Fast-growing supermassive black holes also help toclear the fog around them by ionising gases, which makes the universe moretransparent,” he added. Instruments on very large ground-based telescopesbeing built over the next decade would be able to directly measure theexpansion of the universe using these very bright black holes, Wolf said.