Picture a black hole so powerful that it swallows the equivalent of one sun every day.
Now imagine that black hole also has a mass that's 17 billion times larger than our sun.
Scientists in Australia have just found exactly that.
New research that was published in the journal Nature Astronomy on Monday lays out the discovery of a distant quasar containing what scientists say is the fastest-growing black hole ever recorded.
"It's a surprise it remained undetected until now, given what we know about many other, less impressive black holes," co-author Christopher Onken, a researcher at Australian National University, said in a university news release. "It was hiding in plain sight."
Researchers first detected the black hole using a telescope at the university's Siding Spring Observatory in New South Wales and then confirmed it with the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope, one of the largest telescopes in the world.
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