Astronomers at Coonabarabran’s Siding Springs observatory has just confirmed a discovery of the fastest-growing black hole ever recorded. 

The town has long been known as the nation’s capital of astronomy, and the latest discovery is expected to keep Coonabarabran on the map for a long time, with the record thought unlikely to be beaten.

A black hole, according to NASA, is an area of such immense gravity that nothing - not even light - can escape from it. 

“The incredible rate of growth also means a huge release of light and heat,” lead author Associate Professor Christian Wolf from the Australian National University (ANU) said. 

“So, this is also the most luminous known object in the universe. It’s 200 trillion times brighter than our sun.” 

The mass of the black hole is roughly 17 billion times that of our solar system’s sun. 

The ANU-owned Siding Springs observatory detected the black hole with a 2.3 metre telescope. 

It was then handed to the European Southern Observatory, who own one of the largest telescopes in the world - to confirm the black hole and measure its mass. 

Siding Springs Observatory near Coonabarabran. IMAGE: facebook

“The light from this black hole has travelled over 12 billion years to reach us,” Professor Rachel Webster from the University of Melbourne said.   

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

Siding Springs is also responsible for the discovery of the Vela Pulsar in 1977, and several comets. 

“It’s a surprise it remained undetected until now, given what we know about many other, less impressive black holes,” Co-author Dr Christopher Onken said. 

“It was hiding in plain sight.”

The research was done as part of a 10-year Australian Government partnership with the European Southern Observatory (ESO), in collaboration with the University of Melbourne, and the Sorbonne Université in France.

The researchers’ findings are published in Nature Astronomy.