A distant quasar’s black hole is oddly huge for its galaxy

The first-ever sighting of starlight from a galaxy hosting one of the most distant quasars known has revealed an astronomical oddity.

Quasars — blazingly bright galactic cores — owe their brilliance to the intense heat that results as gas whirls around a big black hole. The black hole powering a quasar 13 billion light-years from Earth is half as massive as all the stars around it — a record high ratio for a quasar host galaxy, astronomers report in a paper submitted October 14 to arXiv.org.

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