This Is The Oldest Known Quasar!
After more than 13 billion years, the light radiating across the universe from its accompanying quasar has illuminated the black hole’s presence in negative space. Researchers, in a paper published this month in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, named the quasar J0313-1806 and write that its animating black hole dates back to just 670 million years after the Big Bang —20 million years older than what is now the second oldest black hole ever found.
This oldest and thus most distant quasar and others like it “are crucial for understanding how the earliest black holes formed and for understanding cosmic reionization—the last major phase transition of our universe," says Xiaohui Fan, an astronomer at the University of Arizona.
J0313-1806’s black hole is 1.6 billion times the mass of the sun and 10 trillion times as bright.
Credits: NASA, Hubble. Image by Science Photo Library.
