Astronomers have discovered
a dusty, red object 13 billion light-years from Earth that may be the earliest known ancestor of a supermassive black hole.
The ancient object shows
characteristics that fall between dusty, star-forming galaxies and brightly glowing black holes known as quasars
IT was Born
just 750 million years after the Big Bang, during an epoch called the "cosmic dawn,"
The object appears to
be the first direct evidence of an early galaxy weaving stardust into the foundations of a supermassive black hole.
Objects like these
known as transitioning red quasars, have been theorized to exist in the early universe, but they have never been observed
The discovered object
connects two rare populations of celestial objects, namely dusty starbursts and luminous quasars