Black Hole 12 Billion Times Larger Than Our Sun Discovered By International Team of Scientists

A group of scientists has discovered a black hole so massive that it actually provides power to the brightest known quasar in the Universe.

The international team, led by astronomers from Peking University in China and University of Arizona, said the black hole was formed about 900 million years after the Big Bang.

The astronomers said the black hole is 12 billion times the size of our Sun. It is so big that it challenges a widely accepted hypothesis of growth rates in the cosmos, they added.

"Based on previous research, this is the largest black hole found for that period of time," said Fuyan Bian of the Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the Australian National University.

"Current theory is for a limit to how fast a black hole can grow, but this black hole is too large for that theory," it added, according to Reuters.

Discovered in 1963, quasars are the most powerful objects beyond the Milky Way galaxy, beaming vast amounts of energy across space.

With the help of new digital sky surveys, astronomers have discovered more than 200,000 quasars, with ages ranging from 0.7 billion years after the Big Bang to today, according to Asian Scientist.

Shining with the equivalent of 420 trillion suns, the new quasar is seven times brighter than the most distant quasar known, which is 13 billion years away.

It harbors a black hole with the mass of 12 billion solar masses, making it the most luminous quasar with the most massive black hole among all the known high redshift, or very distant, quasars.

"Basically, you have two forces balanced together which sets up a limit for growth, which is much smaller than what we found," said Bian.

Xue-Bing Wu at Peking University, China, discovered the black hole as part of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey.

The Australian National University is leading a comparable project, known as SkyMapper, to carry out observations of the Southern Hemisphere sky.

Bian expects more black holes to be observed as the project advances.