June 29, 2011 - Astronomy.com
A team of European astronomers has used the European Southern Observatory’s (ESO) Very Large Telescope (VLT) and a host of other telescopes to discover and study the most distant quasar found to date. This brilliant beacon, powered by a black hole with a mass two billion times that of the Sun, is by far the brightest object yet discovered in the early universe.
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The distance to the quasar was determined from observations made with the FORS2 instrument on ESO’s VLT and instruments on the Gemini North Telescope. Because the object is comparatively bright, it is possible to take a spectrum of it, which involves splitting the light from the object into its component colors. This technique allowed the astronomers to find out quite a lot about the quasar.
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