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Originally Posted by Charlotte Gore, ABC, 20 Feb 2024

Australian National University researchers have discovered the fastest-growing black hole ever recorded, with a mass roughly 17 billion times that of our solar system's Sun.

The supermassive black hole exists within quasar J0529-435, which researchers discovered is also the most luminous known thing being continually powered in the universe.

Researchers hypothesise the black hole is growing to near the proposed upper limit of mass for a star or an accretion disk, but further research and observations of its growth rate are needed to confirm that.

Originally Posted by Charlotte Gore, ABC, 20 Feb 2024

Lead author and ANU Associate Professor, Christian Wolf, said the black hole is indeed creating matter from its environment, and consuming a lot to do so.

"This black hole eats as much mass in a single day as there is in our entire solar system – the Sun and all the planets combined," he said.

"The accretion disk [the holding pattern for all the material waiting to be devoured] is so massive and dense and hot that it starts glowing brightly, and that's the light that we see.

"It's a lot of light that comes out of that accretion disk, about 500 trillion times the amount of light that our Sun emits, or about 20,000 times the amount of light that our entire Milky Way galaxy – with all its billions of stars – emits."

Professor Wolf said the quasar's accretion disk was incredibly big, being seven light years in diameter — 1.5 times the distance from our solar system to the next star in the sky, Alpha Centauri.

Story at ABC here :-
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-02-...arch/103486262