Chinese astronomers have discovered the brightest and largest quasar with the largest ever black hole.
The newly discovered quasar, a shining object produced by a black hole, is 12.8 billion light years from the Earth, is 12 billion times the mass of the Sun, and is 430 trillion times brighter than the Sun.
According to Xiaohui Fan, a professor of astronomy at the University of Arizona and co-author of the study, the major puzzle is how a quasar so bright with a black hole so huge form at a period when the earliest stars and galaxies have just emerged.
It also raised queries about its relationship with its surrounding environment.
"We were so excited when we found such a luminous object just 9 million years after the Big Bang," said lead author Wu Xuebing of Peking University in Beijing, adding that it will challenge theories on how black holes form and grow.
The researchers believe that this will provide a unique laboratory to study the mass assembly and galaxy formation around massive black holes in the early universe.
According to a new study published in the British journal "Nature," the black hole was first spotted with the use of a 2.4-meter telescope from Lijiang in southwest China's Yunnan Province, and its existence was confirmed by follow-up studies in the United States and Chile.
While discovering such a celestial body requires a 10-meter telescope, the Chinese astronomers demonstrated their creativity by being able to see it through a 2-meter telescope, according to astrophysicist Chen Jiansheng of the National Astronomical Observatories at the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
Wu and his team developed technologies in recent years that allowed them to select hundreds of quasar candidates from over a million celestial bodies.
Since the first quasar was spotted in 1963, over 200,000 have been identified.