The most distant supermassive black hole ever found holds secrets to the early Universe

The Verge -------- Astronomers have spotted the most distant supermassive black hole ever seen in our Universe — a behemoth that’s nearly a billion times more massive than our Sun. This is no ordinary black hole either, but an active one known as a quasar that’s surrounded by a super bright, highly energetic disk of swirling gas and dust. And its discovery could help scientists learn more about what conditions were like when the Universe was still quite young. The object — detailed in studies published today in Nature and the Astrophysical Journal Letters — gives us a great snapshot of the past. It’s so far away that its light has taken around 13.1 billion years to reach us. And since the Big Bang is thought to have occurred 13.8 billion years ago, astronomers are seeing this black hole as it looked when the Universe was just 690 million years old. On the cosmological timescale, that’s basically when the Universe was a mere toddler. To learn more click on the picture below to read the article.