Galaxy with black hole discovered

The most distant known galaxy to host a supermassive black hole has been discovered in a galaxy that formed in the early history of the universe. The galaxy, as large as the Milky Way, is about 12.8 billion light-years away and harbors a supermassive black hole that contains at least a billion times as much matter as our sun. The universe is about 13.7 billion years old, and faraway objects like this are near the dawn of time, their light just now arriving at Earth.The find, to be detailed in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society later this month, was unexpected: "It is surprising that such a giant galaxy existed when the universe was only one-sixteenth of its present age, and that it hosted a black hole one billion times more massive than the sun. The galaxy and black hole must have formed very rapidly in the early universe," said Tomotsugu Goto of the University of Hawaii and part of the team that made the discovery.