Astronomers find most distant quasar

NOTTINGHAM, England, June 29 (UPI) -- Astronomers have spotted the most distant quasar located to date, a finding a British researcher says could offer information on the early life of the universe.

University of Nottingham astronomer Simon Dye says the brilliant and rare beacon, powered by a black hole with a mass two billion times that of the sun, is the brightest object yet found from a time when the universe was less than 800 million years old, or just a fraction of its current age.

The object is about 100 million years younger than the previously known most distant quasar and its signal reaching Earth corresponds to looking back in time to a universe that was 5 percent of its current age, a university release said Wednesday.

"Objects that lie at such large distance are almost impossible to find in visible-light surveys because their light is stretched by the expansion of the universe," Dye said. "This means that by the time their light gets to Earth, most of it ends up in the infrared part of the electromagnetic spectrum.

"It took us five years to find this object. This quasar provides a unique opportunity to explore a 100-million-year window of the cosmos that was previously out of reach."

The brilliance of quasars makes them powerful tools to help study the period in the history of the universe when the first stars and galaxies were forming, researchers said.