An Ultra-bright Quasar Is Hiding a Mysterious Black Hole From the Early Days of the Universe

It is a total mystery. From where something so huge appeared so early in our Universe? A discovery of the furthest black hole will surely cause concern for a lot of astrophysicists.

A supermassive black hole - Source: Robin Dienel - Carnegie Instituion for Science

There are many supermassive black holes in the universe. Almost every galaxy has one in its core. But the supermassive black hole recently detected by the international team of astronomers is quite exceptional. This beast that is inside of an extremely bright quasar is shining at us from a Universe that was only 690 million years old. And that’s actually a big problem. And I don’t think anyone will be surprised that this was published in the prestigious Nature magazine.

The furthest quasar - Source: Robin Dienel - Carnegie Instituion for Science

It’s not really about the fact that this is the furthest supermassive black hole we ever found. The problem is that such a big black hole should not exist in such a young universe. But… it’s there. It weights about 800 million Suns and astrophysicists are probably just standing quietly in awe and wondering what to do with it.
Experts don’t really even understand how such a black hole could have even been created in an environment where the conversion from neutral to ionized hydrogen was currently happening. And if this isn’t just an equipment malfunction were talking about a black hole created in a half-ionized universe. It was at that time that the first galaxies were being created and first stars started to shine. And Robert Simcoe from the Kavli Institute says that the age of this supermassive black hole might be the most precise estimate of when first stars appeared.

Eduardo Bañados- Source: Carnegie Institution for Science

The lucky hunter who first observed this unique supermassive black hole was Eduardo Bañados from the Carnegie Institution for Science. He was searching for old quasars. First, he selected a few interesting objects and then pointed the FIRE (Folded-port InfraRed Echellette) at them. FIRE is a spectrometer capable of analyzing an object in deep space utilizing their infrared spectrum.
Bañados and his colleagues using the FIRE spectrometer found out that one of their selected objects is a quasar with a z = 7.5 redshift. That means we are seeing this quasar from about 13 billion light-years away. And scientists don’t know how such a supermassive black hole could have been created from for example a collapsing star and grow to such a gigantic size in such a short time. Something like this should be impossible so at this moment nobody really knows how this quasar came to be.