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Using ESO’s flagship Very Large Telescope,

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along with other telescopes around the world,

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a team of European astronomers has discovered

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the most distant quasar ever recorded!

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By studying this blazing beacon in detail

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the scientists have found that we are seeing this quasar at a time

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when the Universe was just 770 million years old.

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This means that the light from the quasar took 12.9 billion years to reach us.

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Never before has a brighter object been observed

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this far back into the early Universe.

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This is the ESOcast!

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Cutting-edge science and life behind the scenes of ESO,

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the European Southern Observatory.

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Exploring the ultimate frontier with our host Dr J, a.k.a. Dr Joe Liske.

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Quasars are very brilliant distant galaxies

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powered by supermassive black holes at their centres.

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These amazing objects have the mass of millions of suns

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crammed into spaces as small as our Solar System.

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The quasar phenomenon transforms ordinary galaxies

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into what astronomers have fittingly dubbed ‘angry monsters’

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— the most luminous of all objects in the Universe.

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And ESO’s Very Large Telescope, better known as the VLT,

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helped to discover the farthest of these impressive objects ever observed.

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Back in the early Universe

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galaxies contained much more gas and dust than we see in them today.

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Gradually material was used up in the formation of stars and planets,

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and less was available to feed the supermassive black hole,

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the process that creates the impressive jets of a quasar.

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Objects far back in the early Universe,

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like the newly recorded quasar,

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cannot be observed in visible light.

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By the time it reaches our detectors on Earth

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the expansion of the Universe has stretched the light so much

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that it falls mainly into the infrared part of the spectrum.

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In addition, quasars in the early Universe are extremely rare

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and so in order to find this object in the first place

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a team of astronomers had to spend five years

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painstakingly examining huge lists of objects

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from an infrared survey made by the UKIRT telescope

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— before they finally struck gold.

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With such an exciting discovery the team could take no chances;

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they had to validate their findings.

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Using the FORS2 instrument on the VLT,

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along with instruments on the Gemini North telescope,

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a redshift of 7.1 was confirmed.

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This corresponds to such an extraordinary distance

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that it took the light from the quasar 12.9 billion years to reach us.

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Despite the vast distance,

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the quasar’s extreme brightness made it possible to identify

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other characteristics using the same two telescopes.

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It was determined that the black hole powering the quasar

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has a mass of about two billion times that of our own Sun.

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This is an extraordinary mass for an object so early in the Universe.

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Since current estimations say there should only be around

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100 bright quasars at this distance across the entire sky,

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finding this object was a huge challenge.

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It was a great bonus that it has proved to be even more distant

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than the astronomers expected.

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This quasar is a vital probe into the early Universe

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and will help us understand how black holes grew

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just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang.

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ESOcast is produced by ESO, the European Southern Observatory.

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ESO, the European Southern Observatory, is the pre-eminent intergovernmental science and technology organisation in astronomy,

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designing, constructing and operating the world’s most advanced ground-based telescopes.

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Transcription by ESO ; translation by —

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Now that you've caught up with ESO,

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head 'out of this world' with Hubble.

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The Hubblecast highlights the latest discoveries of the world´s most recognized and prized space observatory,

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the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope