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A monster black hole powering “the brightest lighthouse in the distant universe” has been discovered that is 12bn times more massive than the sun, scientists have revealed.
The extraordinary object is at the centre of a quasar - an intensely powerful galactic radiation source - with a million billion times the sun’s energy output.
For years the nature of quasars, discovered in 1963, remained a mystery. Today scientists believe they are generated by matter heating up as it is dragged into supermassive black holes at the centre of distant galaxies.
The new object, named SDSS J0100+2802, is 12.8bn light years from Earth and was formed just 900m years after the Big Bang that gave birth to the universe.
Astronomers cannot explain how such an enormous black hole could have formed so early in cosmic history, soon after the first stars and galaxies emerged.