A supermassive black hole in the far reaches of the Universe has been found guzzling down material at one of the fastest rates ever seen.

At the heart of a quasar galaxy called RACS J0320-35, just 920 million years after the Big Bang , the black hole appears to be devouring matter at 2.4 times the Eddington limit – the theoretical maximum rate, according to a team led by astrophysicist Luca Ighina of the Harvard & Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

This super-Eddington accretion, as the phenomenon is known, may help explain how supermassive black holes grew to masses billions of times that of the Sun, before the Universe was even a billion years old.

Related: This Black Hole Is Eating Stuff at Over 40 Times The Theoretical Limit

"How did the Universe create the first gener

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