The light that scientists have measured was emitted around 12 billion years ago from a supermassive black hole, also known as a quasar, which estimated to be the size of about 20 billion suns and is growing by around one percent every million years.
Due to all of the gases it sucks in daily causes lots of friction and heat, this black hole is shining thousands of times more brightly than an entire galaxy,
"If we had this monster sitting at the centre of our Milky Way galaxy, it would appear 10 times brighter than a full moon. It would appear as an incredibly bright pin-point star that would almost wash out all of the stars in the sky," said Dr Wolf from the ANU Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics.
"Again, if this monster was at the centre of the Milky Way it would likely make life on Earth impossible with the huge amounts of x-rays emanating from it," he added.
The black hole was first detected as near-infrared light by the SkyMapper telescope at ANU’s Siding Spring Observatory. As space expands, that stretches the light waves and changes their colour, the light waves from the black hole had red-shifted over the billions of light years to Earth.
After that the team used data from the ESA’s Gaia satellite to verify that the object was sitting still, meaning it was very far away and possibly a large quasar. Then they used a spectrograph on the ANU’s 2.3 meter telescope to analyse the light.
As these kinds of black holes shine, they can be used as beacons to see and study the formation of elements in the early galaxies of the Universe.
Researchers can see the shadows of objects in front of a quasar. Fast-growing supermassive black holes help to clear the fog around them by ionising gases, which makes the Universe more transparent.
Image credit: NASA/ESA/STScI
Source: Australian National University
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