Astronomers on Mauna Kea have for the first time weighed a black hole at the furthest reaches of the universe. The team from Canada and the United Kingdom studying infrared light from the most distant known quasar, discovered the existence of a black hole one quadrillion times as massive as the Earth. Dr. Douglas Pierce-Price of the Joint Astronomy Centre told KPUA News that the findings give researchers a snapshot of how these objects appeared thirteen billion years ago.

“This quasar actually pinpoints one of the first massive structures to have formed in the universe, and so observations of this allow the researchers to pin down ideas about how structure developed in the early universe,” Pierce-Price said. “In fact, it actually confirms some of the current theories. So although they’ve had these theories before, these observations have suggested to the researchers that they are on the right track.”

Dr. Pierce-Price said researchers will now try to apply similar techniques to other quasars at various distances to trace out their evolution from the early universe to the present.