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Scientists have spotted the brightest and fastest-growing quasar ever seen — a monster black hole that's devouring a sun's-worth of material every day. The brightly burning object, named J0529-4351, weighs between 17 billion and 19 billion solar masses and is located 12 billion light-years from Earth — meaning it dates to a time when the universe was only 1.5 billion years old.  Related: James Webb telescope discovers the oldest, most distant black hole in the universe Black holes are born when giant stars collapse in on themselves, and they grow by devouring all they encounter — be it gas, dust, stars, planets or other black holes. Friction can cause the material spiraling into the maws of these gluttonous space-time ruptures to heat up, which emits light that can be detected by telescopes, turning them into so-called active galactic nuclei (AGN). The most extreme AGNs are quasars — supermassive black holes that are billions of times heavier than...

We can tell how much matter is in the universe by the motions of the stars. In the1920s, physicists attempting to do so discovered a discrepancy and concluded that there must be more matter in the universe than is detectable. How can this be? In 1933, Swiss astronomer Fritz Zwicky, while observing the motion of galaxies in the Coma Cluster, began wondering what kept them together. There wasn’t enough mass to keep the galaxies from flying apart. Zwicky proposed that some kind of dark matter provided cohesion. But since he had no evidence, his theory was quickly dismissed. Then, in 1968, astronomer Vera Rubin made a similar discovery. She was studying the Andromeda Galaxy at Kitt Peak Observatory in the mountains of southern Arizona when she came across something that puzzled her. Rubin was examining Andromeda’s rotation curve, or the speed at which the stars around the center rotate, and realized that the stars on the outer edges moved at the exact same rate as those at the int...