Early Starter

This artist's concept depicts the most-distant quasar yet discovered, seen when the universe was less than 700 million years old. The newly discovered quasar, known by a catalog number, J0313-1806, consists of a black hole about 1.6 billion times the mass of the Sun and a surrounding disk of superheated gas, which glows brilliantly. The disk makes the quasar 1,000 times brighter than our entire Milky Way Galaxy. The presence of the black hole so soon after the Big Bang will help astronomers understand the process by which supermassive black holes form. [NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/J. da Silva]