Astronomers discover Universe’s most distant quasar

PA 201/11 A scientist at The University of Nottingham is part of a team of astronomers which has discovered the most distant quasar to date — a development that could help further our understanding of a universe still in its infancy following the Big Bang. This brilliant and rare beacon, powered by a black hole with a mass two billion times that of the Sun, is by far the brightest object yet found from a time when the Universe was less than 800 million years old — just a fraction of its current age. The object that has been found, named ULAS J1120+0641, is around 100 million years younger than the previously known most distant quasar. It lies at a redshift of 7.1 which corresponds to looking back in time to a Universe that was only 770 million years old, only five per cent of its current age. Prior to this discovery, the most distant quasar known has a redshift of 6.4, the equivalent of a Universe that was 870 million years old. With only an estimated 100 bright quasars with a redshift of higher than 7 in the whole sky, their discovery is an extremely rare find. Nottingham's Simon Dye was on the team which made the discovery, detailed in the June 30 2011 edition of the journal Nature.