But, like any good astrophysics story, it leaves researchers with a number of puzzling questions.
Quasars are extremely bright objects – the brightest in the universe.
J0313-1806, for instance, shines 1,000 times brighter than the entire Milky Way galaxy.
Their calculations put the mass of the black hole at around 1.6 billion times that of the sun.
But this poses a problem.
“That would only be possible in the direct collapse scenario.”
“These quasars presumably are still in the process of building their supermassive black holes” said Fan.
The work has been accepted for publication in Astrophysical Journal Letters.
Update: Clarification of age of the black hole versus the universe.
A previous version of this article stated the black hole is only 670 million years old.
