"Unveiling the Universe's Largest Map of Active Supermassive Black Holes"

Astronomers have created the largest-ever map of the universe's active supermassive black holes, charting around 1.3 million quasars, some of which shone when the universe was only 1.5 billion years old. The map, presented in a paper in The Astrophysical Journal, was built using data from the Gaia space telescope and provides a three-dimensional view of the universe's largest volume. Quasars, powered by supermassive black holes, offer insights into dark matter and the expansion of the cosmos, and the new map is already spurring new scientific research.