Experts have discovered a monster black hole which has a mass of 800 million times of that of the sun and scientists state that the laws of physics dictate should not exist.
The black hole is 13 billion lightyears from Earth, meaning that it formed just 690 million years after the Big Bang when stars were only just beginning to take shape.
Robert Simcoe, the Francis L. Friedman professor of physics at MIT’s Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research said: “This is the only object we have observed from this era.
“It has an extremely high mass, and yet the universe is so young that this thing shouldn’t exist.
“The universe was just not old enough to make a black hole that big. It’s very puzzling.”
Eduardo Bañados, the Carnegie scientist who spotted the behemoth black hole says that there is no way, in current scientific understanding, that a black hole could have gathered such mass in the universe’s infancy.
He said: “Gathering all this mass in fewer than 690 million years is an enormous challenge for theories of supermassive black hole growth.”
Professor Simcoe said: “If you start with a seed like a big star, and let it grow at the maximum possible rate, and start at the moment of the Big Bang, you could never make something with 800 million solar masses – it’s unrealistic.
“So there must be another way that it formed. And how exactly that happens, nobody knows.
“What we have found is that the universe was about 50/50 – it’s a moment when the first galaxies emerged from their cocoons of neutral gas and started to shine their way out.
“This is the most accurate measurement of that time, and a real indication of when the first stars turned on.”