June 29, 2011 - Science 2.0
A quasar named ULAS J1120+0641, 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 - yet.
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The distance to the quasar was determined from observations made with the FORS2 instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) and instruments on the Gemini North Telescope [3]. 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 colours). This technique allowed the astronomers to find out quite a lot about the quasar.
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