June 7, 2007 — An ongoing survey of the heavens has spotted the most distant, and therefore earliest, giant black hole in the universe.
The object, called a quasar and given the catchy name CFHQS J2329-0301, was found with three other extremely distant quasars in the Canada-France High-z Quasar Survey, which uses an imaging instrument called the MegaCam on the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope (CFHT).
"This is indeed the most distant," said Christian Veillet, director of the CFHT. But he wouldn't be surprised, he said, if something even more remote turns up soon. "They are really in the middle of the survey, so there are more to come."
The previously most distant quasar was sighted by astronomers doing the Sloan Digital Sky Survey.
"That is an exciting discovery indeed!" said Sloan Survey and Princeton University astronomer Michael Strauss. "We knew that our record would have to be broken eventually."
The team's discovery was presented on June 7 by University of Ottawa astronomer Chris Willott at the meeting of the Canadian Astronomical Society (CASCA) in Kingston, Ontario.
The distance of CFHQS J2329-0301 is about 13 billion light-years, say the scientists. That figure comes from splitting the quasar's light into a rainbow of colors and seeing how far to the red side of the spectrum some telltale lines have shifted. The greater the red-shift, the greater the distance.
As for how there can be any light from a black hole about 500 million times the mass of the sun, it comes from the superheated material that's falling into it.
