Astronomers at the University of Arizona have detected a quasar located 13.03 billion light-years from Earth, dating back to when the universe was just 5% of its current age. This marks the most distant quasar discovered to date.
A quasar is an extraordinarily luminous galaxy powered by a supermassive black hole at its core that devours surrounding matter. This process unleashes immense energy across the electromagnetic spectrum—from radio waves and infrared to visible light, ultraviolet, and X-rays—making quasars appear exceptionally bright. In essence, quasars are the radiant signatures of actively feeding supermassive black holes.
Announced today, this record-breaking quasar, named J0313-1806 and situated 13.03 billion light-years away, harbors a supermassive black hole with a mass exceeding 1.6 billion solar masses.
It outshines the previous record holder by about 20 million light-years in distance and features a black hole at least twice as massive. This breakthrough offers the tightest constraints yet on supermassive black hole formation in the early universe, advancing our understanding of cosmology.
Such colossal quasars in the infant universe—when it was less than 800 million years old—challenge cosmologists: How did they grow so enormous in so little time?
The standard model posits black holes form from the collapse of massive stars that explode as supernovae, then accrete matter over eons. Yet, like amassing a fortune from meager annual deposits, this process is too slow for these early behemoths. Alternative rapid-growth mechanisms must be at play.
Another theory suggests dense star clusters collapse directly into intermediate-mass black holes. However, J0313-1806's central black hole is far too massive for this pathway. Models indicate that even starting 100 million years post-Big Bang and growing at maximum rates, it could reach only about 10,000 solar masses.
“In other words, the seed of this black hole must have formed by a different mechanism,” explains Xiaohui Fan, University of Arizona astronomer and study co-author. The leading hypothesis: direct collapse of vast clouds of cold, primordial hydrogen gas into a black hole.
Bypassing star formation entirely, this process provides the only viable explanation for such rapid mass accumulation in the universe's dawn.
