Astronomers have found what may be the most powerful thing in the known universe. A black hole with a mass of 12 billion times that of our Sun and the center of a quasar that pumped out energy at a “million billion” ( 1,000,000,000,000,000 ) times the energy of the Sun.

According to Dr. Fuyan Bian of the Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the Australian National University (ANU) the discovery challenges current theories about how black holes formed in the early universe.

“Forming such a large black hole so quickly is hard to interpret with current theories,” said Bian in a statement.

Quasars are formed when material is sucked into a black hole. The gravitational pull causes the material being pulled in to heat up, and release energy which pushes the material falling behind it away. This is known as radiation pressure and it is thought to limit the rate of growth of black holes.

“However this black hole at the centre of the quasar gained enormous mass in a short period of time,” Dr Bian said.

The quasar was chosen from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) of more than a half-billion objects in the northern skies. The SDSS uses multi-filter imaging and spectroscopic redshift and a wide angle telescope at Apache Point Observatory in New Mexico.

The SDSS effectively looks back in time. Anytime, anyone looks into the sky they are looking back in time because it can take thousands or even millions of years for light from a star to reach us. The survey, however, looks much farther back in time. More than 500,000 of the objects surveyed are from more than 7 billion years ago, which is half the age of the Universe since the big bang.

According to the Sloan website, “the Sloan Digital Sky Survey has created the most detailed three-dimensional maps of the Universe ever made, with deep multi-color images of one third of the sky, and spectra for more than three million astronomical objects.”

More information on the survey and some very detailed imagery can be found at sdss.org

Having selected the object the team, led by Xue-Bing Wu at Peking University, China followed up with three other telescopes to gather more detail.

Dr. Bain said that he expects more surprising objects to emerge from the Skymapper – southern sky survey.

“Skymapper will find more of these exciting objects. Because they are so luminous we can see further back in time and can use them to explore the early universe,” Dr Bian said.

As these surveys are conducted and combined, researchers will begin to gather a complete picture of the Universe as well as a more complete history of it.

When the James Webb Space Telescope comes online in 2018, followed by the European Extremely Large Telescope in 2024 researchers will also be able to get a much better look at the objects they find.