Massive sun-devouring black hole found 'hiding in plain sight,' astronomer say

It's 500 trillion times brighter than our sun and devours the equivalent of one every single day.

In fact, a recently-discovered quasar with a black hole at its center just might be the brightest known object in the universe. Located 12 billion light-years from Earth, the black hole is so astoundingly massive, and is releasing such an incredible amount of heat and light, that the team of astronomers who identified it can't believe they were the first.

“It’s a surprise it remained undetected until now, given what we know about many other, less impressive black holes," Christopher Onken, an astronomer at Australian National University, said in a statement. "It was hiding in plain sight.”

Onken was part of an Australian team of astronomers who published a study Monday in the journal Nature Astronomy highlighting their extraordinary findings.

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Record quasar first misclassified as star

The newly-discovered supermassive black hole powering the quasar is not the universe's oldest, but it's pretty darn close.

Nearly as old as the 13.7-billion-year-old universe itself, the object is still ancient. It's also gigantic: roughly 17 billion times the size of our solar system’s sun, according to the study led by Australian National University astronomer Christian Wolf.

The object, J0529-4351, was first discovered in 1980 by the European Southern Observatory, which mistook it for simply a star. It wasn't until last year that it was identified as a quasar, the extremely luminous cores of the galaxy where gas and dust falling into a supermassive black hole emit electromagnetic radiation.

The Australian astronomers turned to the ESO's Very Large Telescope to make observations confirming the black hole's nature.

Astronomers envision chaotic place with winds and lightning

Black holes are of course notoriously difficult to study and observe, but the Australian researchers envision a violent, chaotic place for this record-breaker.

An accretion disc pumping out intense radiation around the black hole is where all the material waits to be devoured, said study co-author Rachel Webster, an astrophysicist at the University of Melbourne.

“In the adolescent universe, matter was moving chaotically and feeding hungry black holes," Webster said in a statement. "Today, stars are moving orderly at safe distances and only rarely plunge into black holes.”

Wolf described it as a "gigantic and magnetic storm cell" plagued by lightning where temperatures can reach more than18,000 degrees Fahrenheit and where "winds blowing so fast they would go around Earth in a second."

More observations are needed to understand just how fast its growing, researchers said.

Eric Lagatta covers breaking and trending news for USA TODAY. Reach him at elagatta@gannett.com