A team of researchers led by former UC Santa Barbara doctoral student Feige Van announced the discovery of J0313-1806, the most distant quasar discovered to date. This quasar, according to the calculations that are used in modern astronomy, has existed for more than 13 billion years, is also the most distant, that is, according to the concepts of cosmologists, the earliest discovered. This was reported at the January 2021 meeting of the American Astronomical Society and published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.
Quasar J0313-1806 is powered by a supermassive “black hole” that has a mass over 1.6 billion times that of the Sun. Object J0313-1806 is 1000 times larger than the Milky Way.
The presence of such a massive black hole at such an early stage in the history of the “expanding universe” does not fit into any theories of cosmologists.
As the study’s lead author Feige Wang, a NASA researcher, said: “The black holes created by the very first massive stars could not have grown to this size in just a few hundred million years.”