A dusty, compact object bridging galaxies and quasars at cosmic dawn

An international effort led by astrophysicists at the Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen, and the Technical University of Denmark has identified a distant object with properties that lie between those of a galaxy and those of a so-called quasar. The object can be seen as the ancestor of a supermassive black hole, and it was born relatively soon after the Big Bang. Simulations had indicated that such objects should exist, but this is the first actual discovery.