A team of Chinese astronomers has discovered the most luminous supermassive quasar, a shining object produced by the black hole, ever found in the distant universe.
According to a new study published today in the British journal "Nature", the quasar is 12 billion times the masses of the Sun and 430 trillion times brighter than the Sun.
The black hole, which is 12.8 billion light years from Earth, was first spotted through a 2.4 metre telescope in Lijiang in southwest China's Yunnan Province and its existence was confirmed by follow-up studies in the United States and Chile, state-run Xinhua news agency reported.
"We were so excited when we found such a luminous object just 9 million years after the Big Bang. It will challenge theories on how black holes form and grow," lead author Wu Xuebing of Peking University here said.
"It's like a child growing to weigh several hundred kilograms in less than ten years. How can we explain it?" Wu said. Fan Xiaohui, professor from the University of Arizona's Steward Observatory and a member of Wu's team, said the discovery "presented a major puzzle" to the theories of black hole growth in the early universe.
The researchers believe that this will provide a unique laboratory to study the mass assembly and galaxy formation around massive black holes in the early universe.
"Spotting such a celestial body usually requires a 10 metre telescope. But Chinese astronomers observed it through a 2 metre telescope. It demonstrates their creativity," said astrophysicist Chen Jiansheng with the National Astronomical Observatories at the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
Thanks to certain key technologies Wu and his team have developed in recent years, they were able to select several hundred quasar candidates from over a million celestial bodies, the report said.
"It's like finding a speck of gold dust on a beach. We are lucky to have spotted the quasar and made follow-up observations," Wu said.
Quasars are believed to be the brightest and most energetic objects in the universe. Since the first quasar was identified in 1963, over 200 thousand quasars have been found.
