Quasars are among the most extreme astrophysical objects in our universe. They contain supermassive black holes and lie at the centers of galaxies, where they quickly consume nearby materials and emit enormous amounts of energy. A small percentage of quasars also drive powerful radio jets, which can travel at nearly the speed of light. Now astronomers have discovered a quasar that is by far the most distant one with powerful jets. Using the European Southern Observatory’s (ESO) Very Large Telescope (VLT), a team of astronomers found the quasar, dubbed P172+18, about 13 billion light-years from Earth, according to a statement. Although this is not the most distant quasar ever detected, it is the most distant “radio-loud” quasar, or quasar with radio jets. “As soon as we got the data, we inspected it by eye, and we knew immediately that we had discovered the most distant radio-loud quasar known so far,” …