Releasing their findings in Nature, researchers led by teams from China's Peking University and the University of Arizona said the black hole -- named SDSS J010013.02 -- was six times larger than its biggest known contemporaries4.
"The existence of such black holes when the universe was less than one billion years old presents substantial5 challenges to theories of the formation and growth of black holes and the co-evolution of black holes and galaxies," they said.