IMPOSSIBLY LARGE BLACK HOLE »

At nearly 13 billion light years distance the ultrabright quasar appears as a tiny red dot in the cente of the image. Credit Sloan Digital Sky Survey An international team of astronomers has found a huge and ancient black hole which was powering the brightest object early in the universe. The black hole's mass is 12 billion times that of the Sun, and was at the centre of a quasar that pumped out a million billion times the energy of our Sun. Team member Dr Fuyan Bian, from the Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the Australian National University (ANU), said the discovery challenges theories of how black holes form and grow in the early universe. "Forming such a large black hole so quickly is hard to interpret with current theories," he said. A quasar is an extremely bright cloud of material in the process of being sucked into a black hole. As the material accelerates towards the black hole it heats up, emitting an extraordinary amount of light which actually pushes away material falling behind it.