A huge black hole has been found by the Australian National University (ANU). The supermassive black hole has been described as a "monster that devours a mass the size of the Sun every two days".
It is estimated that this black hole is about 20 billion suns in size with a growth rate of one percent every million years and has a great capacity for expansion.
Black holes are formed after the collision of two galaxies, as has been previously verified with the Hubble Space Telescope.
"This black hole is growing so fast that it is thousands of times brighter than an entire galaxy because of all the gases it absorbs continuously, which cause a lot of friction and heat," said Christian Wolf, of the ANU School of Research and Astrophysics.
"If we had this monster sitting in the center of our Milky Way, it would look 10 times brighter than a full moon. It would look like an incredibly bright star that would almost eliminate all the stars in the sky," he explained.
The super massive black hole called quasar - the most luminous star in the Universe - emits energy, mainly ultraviolet light, but also X-rays. "Again, if this monster were in the center of the Milky Way, it would probably make life on Earth impossible with the enormous amounts of X-rays emanating from it," he says.
The black hole was detected by the SkyMapper telescope at ANU's SUN spring observatory, by means of near-infrared light, because light waves had shifted red during the billions of light years that separate it from the Earth.
Then the European Space Agency's Gaia satellite confirmed that it was a quasar. It is still a mystery to astronomers how this black hole grew so much and so fast, but Wolf believes that these phenomena can be used as beacons to see and study the first galaxies that formed in the cosmos.
These large, fast-growing black holes are extremely rare, but what has never been seen before is that they expand so quickly.