A research team led by astronomer Julia Scharwächter of the Gemini Observatory and NOIRLab (USA) said they have just found a monster black hole that "cannot exist".

It is the nucleus of the galaxy LID-568, which existed in a region of space just 1.5 billion years after the Big Bang event that created the universe.

What's shocking is that this 12-billion-year-old monster appears to be consuming matter at a dizzying rate, causing it to shine more than 40 times brighter than the theoretical maximum known as the Eddington limit.

That's the limit to how bright an object can become. In the case of a black hole, it brightens by rapidly consuming matter, turning it into a quasar, so bright that it looks like a star from Earth.

As the black hole swallows matter, the incredible amount of friction and gravity heats this disk of material to extremely high temperatures, causing it to glow. But the important thing about light is that it creates a form of pressure.

A single photon wouldn't do much, but the explosion of an active supermassive black hole accretion disk is different.

At some point, the outward radiation pressure matches the inward gravitational force of the black hole, preventing matter from moving any closer. This is the Eddington limit.

But with the presence of the "monster heart" LID-568, the theory that humanity has trusted for decades has officially been broken.

According to Dr. Scharwächter, this extreme case shows that a rapid black hole charging mechanism existed when the universe was first formed.

According to Science Alert, a careful analysis of the data suggests that this monster black hole - as well as other monster black holes of the early universe - may be more modest than today's most massive black holes.

Although larger than the Milky Way's Sagittarius A*, it only weighs about 7.2 million times the mass of the Sun.

So its accretion rate is even more astonishing. At that rate, the super-Eddington accretion phase would be extremely short. The researchers were extremely lucky to capture this rare moment.

The study was recently published in the scientific journal Nature Astronomy.