PARIS: Astronomers said on Wednesday they had snared light from a bright, ancient galaxy with a super-massive black hole at its core, a finding that would help explain aspects of the young Universe. The phenomenon is called a quasar, which are very bright but very distant galaxies with a mighty black hole at their heart. Until now, the most distant quasar ever seen sent light 870 million years ago. This record has now been beaten by European astronomers, who after a five-year probe found a quasar whose light was emitted just 770 million years after the cosmic birth. Measurements show the quasar's black hole has a mass about two billion times that of the Sun. The quasar was born in the last part of “reionization”, an era when a veil of hydrogen gas that smothered the expanding cosmos was cleared by ultraviolet light from early stars.
