Supermassive black hole 12.9 billion years-old

Scientists have discovered what seems to be the oldest supermassive black hole yet.

The black hole, dubbed PSO J0309+27, likely formed just 900 million years after the Big Bang, Live Science reports. Sounds like a long time ago, but cosmically speaking, that’s nothing (at least compared to the age of the universe). Based on their discovery, the team of Italian astronomers suspects that there were probably hundreds more black holes just like it during the earliest days of the universe’s existence.

The team managed to spot the black hole because it gave off a blazar — a massive explosion focused into a beam-like jet of ions. The explosion occurred nearly 13 billion years ago, but the light it gave off is still reaching Earth today, according to research published in the journal Astronomy Astrophysics last week.

“Thanks to our discovery, we are able to say that in the first billion years of life of the universe, there existed a large number of very massive black holes emitting powerful relativistic jets,” lead researcher Silvia Belladitta of the University of Insubria said in a press release. ~ Read the full article.