The brightest of the most distant and the most distant of the bright quasars is found.

Fantasy artist on the theme of quasar / Zhaoyu Li / Shanghai Astronomical Observator

Chinese astronomers discovered the brightest of all known quasars, formed by a supermassive black hole weighing about 1.2 * 10 ¹⁰ solar masses. Quasar was named SDSS J0100 + 2802. The uniqueness of the find is that it is also the most distant known quasar of such a large mass.

The distance to it is about 12.8 billion light years, so it appeared no later than 900 million years after the Big Bang. But current theories of the origin of quasars do not explain the possibility of the existence of such a massive black hole formed so early.

For the formation of such a massive black hole to become possible in less than a billion years, the quasar SDSS J0100 + 2802 needed to attract interstellar matter in large quantities. At the same time, the growing emission of quasar, according to calculations, should have impeded this process.
')
Direct determination of the distance to remote space objects is impossible. One of the indirect methods is to measure the distance by redshift. In total, science now knows about 40 quasars with an offset of z> 6, and the brightness of the newly discovered quasar (its offset z = 6.3) exceeds several times the maximum brightness of any of these 40.


A new quasar surpasses all known before it and in brightness and in mass

Quasars noticed a long time ago, and at first they found it difficult to give an explanation for their existence. It is now accepted that these are supermassive black holes with accretion disks of matter around them, and the more matter there is, the stronger their radiation will be. Quasars radiate very actively both in the radio and in the light range. For example, the brightness of a new quasar is about 420 trillion times greater than that of our Sun.

The new quasar not only raised interesting questions in astrophysics, but also will help in the study of deep space. Thanks to its radiation, scientists will be able to study objects that cross the line between our planet and the quasar.