Fastest Growing Black Hole:

[beecee]

https://phys.org/news/2018-05-astronomers-fastest-growing-black-hole-space.html

Astronomers find fastest-growing black hole known in space

May 15, 2018, Australian National University

Astronomers at ANU have found the fastest-growing black hole known in the Universe, describing it as a monster that devours a mass equivalent to our sun every two days.

The astronomers have looked back more than 12 billion years to the early dark ages of the Universe, when this supermassive black hole was estimated to be the size of about 20 billion suns with a one per cent growth rate every one million years.

"This black hole is growing so rapidly that it's shining thousands of times more brightly than an entire galaxy, due to all of the gases it sucks in daily that cause lots of friction and heat," said Dr Wolf from the ANU Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics.

"If we had this monster sitting at the centre of our Milky Way galaxy, it would appear 10 times brighter than a full moon. It would appear as an incredibly bright pin-point star that would almost wash out all of the stars in the sky."

Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2018-05-astronomers-fastest-growing-black-hole-space.html#jCp

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the paper:

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1805.04317.pdf

Discovery of the most ultra-luminous QSO :using Gaia, SkyMapper and WISE:

Abstract: 

We report the discovery of the ultra-luminous QSO SMSS J215728.21-360215.1 with magnitude z = 16.9 and W4= 7.42 at redshift 4.75. Given absolute magnitudes of M145,AB = −29.3, M300,AB = −30.12 and log Lbol/Lbol, = 14.84, it is the QSO with the highest unlensed UV-optical luminosity currently known in the Universe. It was found by combining proper-motion data from Gaia DR2 with photometry from SkyMapper DR1 and the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE). In the Gaia database it is an isolated single source and thus unlikely to be strongly gravitationally lensed. It is also unlikely to be a beamed source as it is not discovered in the radio domain by either NVSS or SUMSS. It is classed as a weak-emission-line QSO and possesses broad absorption line features. A lightcurve from ATLAS spanning the time from October 2015 to December 2017 shows little sign of variability

Edited May 15, 2018 by beecee

[T. McGrath]

The last half of the first paragraph of the introduction of the paper says it all:

Quote

How they grew to such mass so early after the Big Bang is a profound puzzle for physics. They must have grown at super-Eddington rates for a long period of time; or they originate from massive seed black holes that formed during the dark early ages by direct collapse (Bromm & Loeb, 2003; Pacucci et al., 2015).

Direct collapse would appear to be the only way you can get a 20 billion solar mass super massive black hole in under a billion years, but they have yet to explain the mechanism behind the super-Eddington collapse rates.

Edited May 21, 2018 by T. McGrath