
NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/J. da Silva
An international team of astronomers have discovered the most distant quasar in the Universe, fully formed around 670 million years after the Big Bang. At its center lies a supermassive black hole 1.6 billion more massive than the sun, surrounded by a swirling, superheated accretion disk. The object is the first of its kind to show evidence of an outflowing wind of super-heated gas escaping from the surroundings of the black hole at a fifth of the speed of light.