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"It's a time when we astronomers get to be children again... It's just so extraordinary when we identified this object."
That is Samuel Lai, an astronomer at the Australian National University who has co-authored a new study published in the journal, Nature Astronomy.
The study reported a startling discovery: a quasar that shines 500 trillion times brighter than the sun.
"This outshines tens of thousands of galaxies just like the Milky Way. So this is 10,000 times brighter than our entire Milky Ways. And the Milky Way is a 100 billion stars. So this is one supermassive black hole versus 100 billion stars. And which one is brighter? All I can say is you can't bet against the supermassive black hole every time."
Lead author Christian Wolf says it's an unusual discovery - and not just because the object was wrongly assumed to be a star when first identified in the 1980s.
"We don't see big quasars any more. We only see them when we look into great distances, into the early times of the universe. Nowadays there are still the black holes around but they are just sleeping giants that sit in the darkness of space, most at the centres of large galaxies, and they don't really eat much anymore."
Dr Wolf says the brighter the quasar, the faster the black hole is growing - and this one is a hungry cosmic hurricane, gobbling up the equivalent of one sun per day.
"Many people have already heard of a black hole. And a quasar is a form of black hole... Now black holes as we hear by the name are black. But when black holes eat, they can turn into what we call a quasar. And that's because all that matter that streams towards the black hole and swirls around it, heats up in that process and starts shining brightly. Just put in enough matter that you get enough light output, more than you get from whole galaxies with millions of stars, and then you have a quasar."
Dr Mariya Lyubenova is an astronomer at the European Southern Observatory in Germany.
She says black holes can tell us a lot about the origins of the universe.
"It allows us to see the very early stages of formation of galaxies... We know nowadays that most of galaxies harbour in their centres very massive black holes. But we do not know how exactly they were formed, how exactly they were accreting their matter to become so large and so on."
Samuel Lai says this quasar is 12 billion light-years away and has been around since the early days of the universe.
He says more research is needed to understand how these black holes operate.
"In simple language, it means that without these black holes, our galaxy as we know it wouldn't be what it is today. In fact, all galaxies would be very different without their supermassive black holes. In fact, it may even be possible that all galaxies form around these supermassive black holes."
The quasar was first detected using a 2.3 metre telescope at the ANU Siding Spring Observatory near Coonabarabran in New South Wales.
The research team then turned to one of the largest telescopes in the world – the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile's Atacama Desert – to confirm the full nature of the black hole and measure its mass.
Dr Wolf wants that partnership to continue - but he sees a bright future for Australian-based research too, with scientists uniquely placed to study the skies.
"When we are talking about observing rapidly changing events, maybe something that only lasts for a whole hour - something that goes bang in the night - and if it's daylight in Hawaii or Chile but it's night-time in Australia, it's important that someone from Australia looks when this happens. And so Australia also needs good facilities for this purpose."
