An international team of astronomers has discovered 83 “quasars”, extremely luminous active galactic nucleus powered by supermassive black holes in the distant universe, from a time when the universe was less than 10 per cent of its present age.
A supermassive black hole becomes visible when gas accretes onto it, causing it to shine as a quasar.
Using the massive Subaru Telescope, located at the Mauna Kea Observatory on Hawaii, the scientists from Japan, Taiwan and and the US, focussed their attention on objects located about 13 billion light-years away from Earth.