(Photo Courtesy of Daniel Stolte - University of Arizona)

An animation of a quasar with a black hole in the center.

(Photo Courtesy of Daniel Stolte - University of Arizona)

Graph comparing weight and brightness of known quasars. The new discovery is the red dot in the upper right.

Astronomers in Southern Arizona have helped discover the most intense object in the early parts of the universe. But with the new discovery, there are more questions than answers.

A international network of telescopes including The University of Arizona has discovered the largest quasar and black hole in the cosmic dawn of the universe.

Only 900 million years away from the Big Bang, it takes dispersing visible light into non-visible wavelengths to measure something that far away. Christian Veillet is with the Large Binocular Telescope Observatory in southern Arizona.

“The main discovery was made in visible light, which is light we all see," Veillet said. "And so what was needed is really to disperse that light to make what we call a spectrum with a spectrograph. By doing so we can determine the distance of the object.”

Quasars are the most powerful objects in the universe and beam out incredibly intense energy. At the center of each one is a black hole that sucks in surrounding matter. This newly discovered quasar weighs 12 billion times our sun and shines 420 trillion times as bright.

“About 10,000 times brighter than all stars in the Milky Way Galaxy put together," said Xiaohui Fan, a professor of astronomy at UA.

Fan said with the discovery of the most brilliant object so close to the edge of the known universe, it leaves uncertainties about how humans understand black holes.

“It doesn’t challenge the Big Bang theory in any direct way," said Fan. "But it is challenging sort of the conventional theory of how we form a black hole.”

By comparison, the closest black hole present in our own galaxy weighs only 4 million times our sun.