Supermassive black hole is ‘gorging on’ an Earth-sized mass of space per second

A SUPERMASSIVE black hole taking Earth-sized bites of the universe has been discovered in the night sky.

The black hole has some of the most unique characteristics in the known universe.

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In a study on the black hole, researchers assessed that it is the most luminous of its kind in the last nine billion years.

Lead researcher Dr Christopher Onken said the discovery is like a “very large, unexpected needle in the haystack” in a press release from the Australian National University.

Space.com reported that the newly discovered black hole is 500 times larger than the black hole at the center of the Milky Way.

“Astronomers have been hunting for objects like this for more than 50 years. They have found thousands of fainter ones, but this astonishingly bright one had slipped through unnoticed,” Onken added.

The black hole is eight times brighter than 3C 273, the first-ever discovered quasar also known for its intense luminosity.

“Now we want to know why this one is different – did something catastrophic happen? Perhaps two big galaxies crashed into each other, funneling a whole lot of material onto the black hole to feed it,” Onken said.

The black hole is so large that our entire Solar System could fit behind its event horizon – not even light can escape the hole’s draw once it passes this demarcating line.

“We are fairly confident this record will not be broken. We have essentially run out of sky where objects like this could be hiding,” a co-author of the study added.

The hole is also a quasar designated as J114447.77- 430859.3.

Quasars are mysterious celestial objects that expel particles at near-light speed as they tear away from the black hole’s edges.

“Quasars are capable of emitting hundreds or even thousands of times the entire energy output of our galaxy, making them some of the most luminous and energetic objects in the entire Universe,” Nasa wrote in a blog post about the Hubble Telescope.

Dr Onken and his team said the newly-discovered quasar is so bright it can be observed with amateur telescopes in areas with low light pollution.

Though it’ll appear as just a dot in the sky, J114447.77- 430859.3 has more mass than two trillion Jupiters, based on numbers reported by Phys.org.