2000 PDT A quasar the size of 1 billion suns that was spotted last month is the most distant object in the universe found to date, astronomers at the Sloan Digital Sky Survey said Thursday. The quasar was spotted at the very edge of the observable universe by Xiaohui Fan, a graduate student at Princeton University , said Michael S. Turner, a spokesman for the survey . Wired News delivered to your inbox or hand-held device. The bright red quasar , a super-massive black hole, is estimated to be 28 billion light years away.
Quasars look like very bright stars but actually are black holes at the center of forming galaxies.
The extremely bright light the nascent galaxies emit is generated by the vast amounts of matter being sucked into the black holes at their centers. Because they are found at the earliest stages of the formation of galaxies, quasars are some of the earliest, and therefore the most distant, objects in the universe. Turner said the quasar could be as large as 10 billion suns. The black hole at the center of our galaxy, the Milky Way, is only about 3 million times the mass of the sun. Turner said that because light from the quasar traveled such a vast distance, it appears to us today as it looked when the universe was less than one billion years old, and was only four billion light years away.