Astronomers have made a surprise discovery of the most-distant supermassive black hole ever seen. First observed by Carnegie Observatories researchers led by Eduardo Bañados, the black hole was found to exist in a quasar dating to some 690 million after the Big Bang — an eon to us, but brief in the timescale of the universe. “Gathering all this mass in fewer than 690 million years is an enormous challenge for theories of supermassive black hole growth,” Bañados said.