Black holes are among the most fascinating objects in the universe. These massive entities are known for their unique characteristic of irretrievably swallowing any form of matter or information that comes too close. Nothing that has passed the Event Horizon of a black hole can exit it again from the inside. Despite our current understanding of these true space monsters, there are still unanswered questions for future research. In this article, we will discuss the discovery of the most distant known black hole and other rare observations recently recorded in the cosmos.

The most distant black hole detected so far is known as J1342+0928. This black hole is located 13 billion light-years away from our blue home planet and is 800 million times bigger than our sun. The discovery of this gigantic black hole made high waves in the ranks of experts. The object was formed in an era when the universe had reached only five percent of its present age, just 690 million years after the birth of the cosmos.

As exciting as the discovery may seem at first glance, it poses some technical challenges for experts. First and foremost is the question of how all this mass could accumulate in such a short period of time by galactic standards. The scientific object of interest adorns the center of a super-bright disc of orbiting gas. Such an active galactic nucleus is called a quasar by experts.

Quasars are not only active galactic nuclei but also the brightest objects in the universe. Some of these galactic centers emit light thousands of times stronger than that of a large galaxy. This characteristic cannot be transferred to the properties of black holes because, in fact, the gravity monsters do not emit any light at all. The light that radiates around the black hole is, therefore, caused by the accretion disk around the massive structure. An accretion disk is a rotating disc that transports matter incessantly in the direction of the center. In the case of the black hole mentioned above, the swirling of gas creates immense friction.

Quasars are of unimpeachable importance to experts in the study of the early universe. The light emitted from them can be analyzed to obtain important information about the hydrogen it has passed through on its journey through the vast expanses of the universe. The black hole is also old enough to give us a glimpse of an exciting epoch in the early universe known as reionization.

Shortly after the big bang, the universe was a dark, hot cosmic primordial soup that was rapidly expanding. As the construct continued to expand, it eventually began to cool. As a result of this process, protons and neutrons began to combine to form ionized hydrogen atoms in a phase that occurred some 240,000 to 300,000 years after the birth of the universe. These newly formed hydrogen atoms, in turn, attracted electrons, whereupon they fused to form neutral hydrogen. This development represented the galactic starting signal for the light, since it was no longer scattered by free electrons and could move freely through the cosmos.

It wasn’t until the influence of gravity led to the formation of the first stars and galaxies in this hydrogen-filled construct that starlight also found its way into the universe. The current theories of experts assume that the neutral hydrogen was excited by the ultraviolet light of these newly formed stars and galaxies. This caused most of the hydrogen in the universe to reionize, meaning that it split into protons and electrons. That process, which experts call reionization, was completed about a billion years after the big bang.

However, the exact time of this fundamental epoch and its details are extremely difficult to reconstruct today. The remote black hole comes into play for scientists in the detailed study of the accretion disk light.