I’ll keep this post brief, but these numbers are pretty mind-boggling: Australian astronomers have detected a black hole that is 20 billion times the mass of our sun, one which eats the equivalent of a star every two days. Not only that, it is 10,000 times brighter than the galaxy it lives in, because it is growing so fast — that’s as luminous as 700 trillion suns. (This may make “black hole” seem like a bit of an oxymoron, but as the article explains: “they can only swallow so much, depending on their size; the rest of the matter gets splashed out across space, producing […] fireworks.”) No need to worry about it, though — it’s 12 billion light years away.
Check out the NYT article here, and the original research paper here.
