Rapidly growing black hole

Dr Christopher Onken and PhD candidate Samuel Lai. Photo: Jaime Kidston/ANU - The fastest-growing black hole of the last nine billion years has been discovered by an international team led by astronomers at The Australian National University (ANU). The black hole consumes the equivalent of one Earth every second and shines 7,000 times brighter than all the light from our own galaxy, making it visible to well-equipped backyard astronomers. Lead researcher Dr Christopher Onken and his co-authors describe it as a "very large, unexpected needle in the haystack". "Astronomers have been hunting for objects like this for more than 50 years. They have found thousands of fainter ones, but this astonishingly bright one had slipped through unnoticed," Dr Onken said. The black hole has the mass of three billion suns.