Researchers from China's Peking University have located a supermassive black hole that is estimated to have formed around 900 million years after the Big Bang and weigh as much as 12 billion suns. According to National Geographic, though the black hole is not the biggest ever found, it is astonishingly large for its age.

CNN reports that a black hole is defined as a dense region of space that has collapsed in on itself in a way that means nothing can escape it, not even light. Giant black holes are thought to form slowly by vacuuming up gas and anything that comes too close, which makes the formation of such a large young black hole perplexing. Xue-Bing Wu, lead author of the study, asked, "How do you build such a big black hole in such a short time?"

The black hole was located through the use of multiple telescopes around the world in locations including China, Hawaii, Arizona, and Chile. An extraordinarily bright quasar was spotted, which indicated that the underlying black hole was astonishingly massive.

For those who may not know, a quasar is a distant object powered by a supermassive black hole. Space reports that although light cannot escape from a black hole, some galactic nuclei can break free around its edges. Particles then accelerate away from the black hole near the speed of light, and jets above and below the black hole act as particle accelerators. As a result, quasars are extremely bright - they shine anywhere from 10 to 100,000 times brighter than the Milky Way.

In this case, the discovered quasar was about 40,000 times brighter than the Milky Way. Wu stated, "We've seen other quasars from this period, but none of them has a mass of more than three billion times that of the sun." The University of Arizona quoted Wu, "This quasar is very unique... Just like the brightest lighthouse in the distant universe, its glowing light will help us to probe more about the early Universe."

The researchers' findings have been published in Nature, and could challenge theories of black hole formation. The study states, "The existence of such black holes when the Universe was less than one billion years old presents substantial challenges to theories of the formation and growth of black holes and the co-evolution of black holes and galaxies."