Astronomers find black hole 12bn times sun’s size

A monster black hole powering “the brightest lighthouse in the distant universe” has been discovered that is 12 billion times more massive than the sun, scientists have revealed.

The extraordinary object is at the centre of a quasar — an intensely powerful galactic radiation source — with a million billion times the sun’s energy output.

For years the nature of quasars, discovered in 1963, remained a mystery. Today scientists believe they are generated by matter heating up as it is dragged into supermassive black holes at the centre of distant galaxies.