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May 15, 2018

The fastest-growing black hole in the universe eats a sun every 48 hours — and astronomers have found it

Posted by in category: cosmology

It’s growing so rapidly that it’s shining thousands of times more brightly than an entire galaxy.


A “supermassive” black hole swallowing up the mass of our sun every two days has been found by Australian astronomers.

Astronomers at the Australian National University (ANU), led by Dr Christian Wolf of the Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics, found the fastest-growing black hole known in the universe by looking back more than 12 billion years to what they call “the early dark ages of the universe.”

It takes a million years to grow by 1%, but given it’s already estimated to be as big as 20 billion suns, that means the black hole, also known as a quasar, is growing by around 66.5 million Earths annually.

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