Scientists find most distant quasar to date
Artist rendering of a quasar. Credit: NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/J. da Silva.
A team of astronomers including a University of Michigan researcher has observed a luminous quasar 13.03 billion light-years from Earth—the most distant quasar discovered to date.
The quasar—a luminous object with a supermassive black hole at the center—sheds light on how black holes grow.
Dating back to 670 million years after the Big Bang, when the universe was only 5% its current age, the quasar hosts a supermassive black hole equivalent to the combined mass of 1.6 billion suns.
In addition to being the most distant, and by extension, earliest, quasar known, the object is the first of its kind to show evidence of an outflowing wind of superheated gas escaping from the surroundings of the black hole at a fifth of the speed of light.