OUR COSMOS

Black hole as heavy as all the matter in our Milky Way galaxy

A team of astronomers have found a colossal black hole 12.7 billion light-years away which is so ancient, they're not sure how it had enough time to grow to its current size, about 10 billion times the mass of the Sun.
Sitting at the heart of a distant galaxy, the black hole -- known as a blazar -- appears to be about 12.7 billion years old, which means it formed just one billion years after the universe began and is one of the oldest supermassive black holes ever known.
The black hole, researchers said, is big enough to hold 1000 of our own Solar Systems and weighs about as much as all the stars in the Milky Way.
The supermassive black hole, dubbed Q0906+6930, is a blazar. This refers to a type of quasar, a bright galaxy with an active supermassive black hole at its core. Like quasars, blazars have particle jets, only the jets -- by chance alignment -- are pointed directly in Earth's direction. Blazars are strong gamma ray emitters.