Astonished, I found the brightest black hole devouring matter equal to one sun per day

(Illustration: black hole)

A team of scientists has discovered the brightest and hungriest black hole ever found. Because it is 500 trillion times brighter than the sun, it consumes as much material as one sun consumes daily. It is called black hole J0529-4351.

A team of scientists reported the discovery of the brightest black hole ever discovered in the universe in the journal Nature Astronomy, noting that black hole J0529-4351 is a hungry and insatiable black hole, the type that consumes matter, stars, gas and dust. One sun a day, every day.

Black hole J0529-4351 is located 12 billion light-years from our planet, and has a mass roughly greater than that of our sun. 17,000-19,000 million times, and each year, black holes consume or absorb matter, gas and dust in an amount equivalent to the mass of 370 suns, making black hole J0529-4351 500 trillion times brighter than our sun.

Christian Wolff, an astronomer at the Australian National University and leader of the team that discovered this black hole, said: “We have found the fastest growing black hole known to date.” It has a mass equivalent to 17 billion suns, and consumes the equivalent of one sun's worth of material per day, making it the brightest interstellar object known in the universe.

Astronomers discovered the black hole J0529-4351 44 years ago, but it was so bright that astronomers couldn't identify it as a quasar, or a group of very bright objects in space. And very far from the world, it contains a massive black hole surrounded by a cloud of gas rotating around it.

For new discoveries by astronomers and to be able to identify it as black hole J0529-4351, astronomers used the Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile.