spacetoday.net: Astronomers discover most distant quasar

Posted: Fri, Jul 1, 2011, 7:18 AM ET (1118 GMT)
Quasar ULAS J1120+0641 illustration (Gemini Observatory/AURA by Lynette Cook)

Astronomers announced this week that they have discovered a quasar that dates back to less than a billion years after the Big Bang, a discovery that raises new questions about the early history of the universe. Astronomers used the Gemini Observatory in Hawaii and the Very Large Telescope in Chile to confirm that the object, designated ULAS J1120+0641 and first spotted in a previous infrared survey, is a distant quasar. The quasar has a redshift of 7.1, corresponding to a distance of 12.9 billion light-years; it thus dates back to 770 million years after the Big Bang. The discovery puzzles astronomers, since quasars are thought to be supermassive black holes as much as a billion times as massive as the Sun at the center of galaxies, and it would be difficult for an object that massive to form so soon after the Big Bang. A paper about the quasar's discovery was published in this week's issue of the journal Nature.