The farthest quasar and black hole seen by telescopes

WHEN FEIGE WANG was growing up in Shandong province, China, he liked gazing up at the night sky to look at the stars. Now, as a NASA Hubble fellow at the University of Arizona’s Steward Observatory, he looks much deeper into the darkness to contemplate the most distant objects ever studied.

His targets, quasars, are black holes surrounded by disks of gas and stars—the nuclei of primitive galaxies. Their dark hearts suck in nearby matter and crush the absorbed material into a superhot disk, which burns bright as it shoots out immense amounts of energy. That’s the feature…