Staring down the throat of an ancient, *extremely* distant black hole

Using one of the largest optical light telescopes in the world, astronomers have identified one of the rarest beasts in the Universe: An extremely distant type of galaxy called a BL Lac object, a galaxy's supermassive black hole spewing out a beam of energy so powerful it dwarfs the light of the entire galaxy it comes from.

While over a hundred BL Lac objects are known, this is the first one every seen at this incredible distance — the light we see from it has traveled 12 billion years to get t...