An article published in the journal “Astrophysical Journal Letters” reports the discovery of the brightest quasar in the early universe. A team of researchers used observations of the Hubble Space Telescope and some ground-based telescopes to identify the galaxy cataloged as J043947.08+163415.7 at a distance of about 12.8 billion light years from the Earth. The supermassive black hole at its center is surrounded by a lot of materials that emit the huge amount of light that allows it to be identified even at that enormous distance, but only thanks to a gravitational lensing effect. That activity dates back almost a billion years after the Big Bang.