Enormously 'hungry' black hole that eats 370 Suns a year is likely the brightest object in universe

Scientists have discovered the brightest object ever in the universe: a hungry black hole that devours the gas equivalent of the Sun, every day.

The scientists at the Australian National University observed the fast-moving, ferocious quasar that has a mass of 17 billion Suns, making it 500 trillion times brighter than our ball of heat and light.

Quasars are celestial objects powered by giant black holes of up to 10 billion times the mass of the Sun. They emit more energy than any other object in the universe.

The newly discovered enormous black hole is chugging everything that falls near its event horizon and growing at a rate that scientists have never witnessed, said the astronomers who made the observation using theEuropean Southern Observatory's (ESO) Very Large Telescope (VLT).

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They are predicting that the hungry quasar is consuming the equivalent of 370 Suns a year which comes down to about one a day.

"We have discovered the fastest-growing black hole known to date. It has a mass of 17 billion Suns and eats just over a Sun per day. This makes it the most luminous object in the known Universe," said Christian Wolf, an astronomer at the Australian National University (ANU) and lead author of the study.

"This quasar is the most violent place that we know in the universe," he added.

Interestingly, the quasar had been hiding in plain sight as it was misclassified as a star previously.

Having been spotted in the 1980s, the quasar namedJ0529-4351 was reclassified followingobservations in Australia and Chile's Atacama Desert last year.

Scientists said the quasar discovered is so far away from our planet that it took over 12 billion years for us to see it. The current accepted age of our universe is 13.8 billion years. Although, last year,Rajendra Gupta of the University of Ottawa published a report, claiming that theuniverse may be around 26.7 billion years old.

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What are quasars?

Quasars are supermassive black holes, often situated at the heart of a galaxy, millions to billions of times more massive than our Sun. Quasars are super hungry as they devour any matter in the vicinity by using their immense gravitational pull.

They also emit tremendous amounts of radiation, including jets of high-energy particles,while a glowing disk of matter spins around them.

Last year, scientists published a research after monitoring over 190 quasars for two decades which stated that time passed only about a fifth as quickly as it does today due to dilation in the early universe.

The scientists compared the brightness of the 190 quasars, dating to about 1.5 billion years after the Big Bang event to that ofquasars existing today. In doing so, they found that certain fluctuationsthat occur in a particular amount of time today did so five times more slowly in the most ancient quasars.

(With inputs from agencies)