A team of scientists from China and Arizona spotted the brightest quasar from the early universe, named SDSS J0100+2802, centered on a black hole 12.8 billion light years away and as bright as 420 trillion suns.

Quasars are celestial objects that are essentially very bright clouds of material being swallowed by a black hole. The material accelerates toward the black hole and heats up in the process, causing it to glow brightly.

The existence of such a powerful and ancient object presents something of a puzzle for scientists because it formed less than a billion years after the Big Bang, when the universe was relatively young.