A team of European astronomers has used a number of telescopes, data from The European UKIRT Infrared Deep Sky Survey (UKIDSS) and five years of searching to find a quasar. This is a very bright, very distant galaxy that is juiced up by a supermassive black hole at its centre.

The black hole in the middle of ULAS J11 has a mass of two billion times that of our sun, and the overall galaxy is the brightest object in the early Universe, according to astronomers

“We see it now as it was just 770 million years after the Big Bang, during the prehistoric universe’s reionisation era. This was when the intense ultraviolet radiation of early stars ripped apart hydrogen atoms into protons and electrons, making the universe more transparent to ultraviolet light,” they said.

Stellar objects from this era are so stretched out by the expansion of the universe that they fall mostly in the infrared part of the spectrum. But while they hide in visible-light surveys, they can be spotted by dedicated infrared telescopes, like the UKIRT telescope in Hilo, Hawaii.

The team of astronomers spent half a decade hunting through millions of objects in the UKIDSS database to find quasars. “We were looking for a quasar with redshift higher than 6.5,” said Bram Venemans, one of the authors of the study. “Finding one that is this far away, at a redshift higher than 7, was an exciting surprise.”

Its discovery gives astronomers new information on the first few hundred million years history of the universe. The high mass of the supermassive black hole at such an early age could rewrite theories that these objects build up very slowly over time.