In the dark and early ages of the Universe there was a paradox that a group of Australian astronomers has just discovered: a supermassive bright hole that grows as never before observed.
So first, a black hole that shines seems a contradiction in itself, right?
The explanation has, on the one hand, the size of the hole itself, with a mass equivalent to that of 20,000 million times that of our Sun, and, on the other, its speed of expansion.
"This black hole is growing so fast that it is thousands of times brighter than an entire galaxy, because of all the gases that it absorbs daily and that cause a lot of friction and heat," explained Dr. Christian Wolf of the School of Astronomy and Astrophysics of the National University of Australia (ANU).
In fact, its voracity is so great that every two days it absorbs a mass equivalent to that of our Sun, they reported from the ANU.
These large, fast-growing black holes are extremely rare, but what had never been observed before is that they expanded so quickly. The research team that has found it to 12,000 million light years using the SkyMapper telescope.
A spectacular shine
This type of genuine black holes are also known as quasars and are the brightest stars in the Universe.
They are formed after the collision of two galaxies, as previously proved with the Hubble Space Telescope.
"If we had this monster in the center of our Milky Way, it would look ten times brighter than a Lunallena and eliminate all the stars in the sky," Wolf says.
The light from this particular black hole was mainly ultraviolet, although it also radiated rays that "would make life impossible on Earth if it were at the center of our Milky Way," says the Australian astronomer.
The Skymapper telescope detected this light once it had turned red in its path of billions of years to Earth and then the Gaia satellite of the European Space Agency confirmed that it was a quasar.
It is still a mystery to astronomers to know how this black hole grew so fast and fast, but Wolf believes that these phenomena can be used as beacons to see and study the first galaxies that formed in the cosmos.