“‘We think there are only about 100 bright quasars with redshift higher than 7 over the whole sky,’ concludes Daniel Mortlock, the leading author of the paper. ‘Finding this object required a painstaking search, but it was worth the effort to be able to unravel some of the mysteries of the early Universe.’“
European astronomers find the farthest quasar yet discovered, 12.9 billion light years away and dating to only 770 million years after the Big Bang. “This brilliant beacon, powered by a black hole with a mass two billion times that of the Sun, is by far the brightest object yet discovered in the early Universe.“