Scientists reveal largest map of the universe's active supermassive black holes ever created

Researchers have unveiled a moving 3D map of supermassive black holes that covers the largest volume of our universe ever charted. 

The map is made up of 1.3 million quasars, which are cores of active galaxies powered by supermassive black holes and some of the brightest cosmic objects in existence. 

The light emitted by quasars comes from the supermassive black hole's gravitational pull on nearby clouds of gas, according to a statement released by the Simons Foundation in New York, which funds and supports research in science and mathematics. As friction heats up these clouds, they can form a bright, fast-moving disk that occasionally sprouts powerful jets of light.

The new map, called Quaia, is a catalog of quasars based on data collected by the European Space Agency's Gaia space telescope, among other sources. It appears in a new study published Monday (March 18) in The Astrophysical Journal. 

"This quasar catalog is different from all previous catalogs in that it gives us a three-dimensional map of the largest-ever volume of the universe," map co-creator David Hogg, an astrophysicist at New York University and senior research scientist at the Simons Foundation's Flatiron Institute, said in the statement.

"It isn't the catalog with the most quasars, and it isn't the catalog with the best-quality measurements of quasars, but it is the catalog with the largest total volume of the universe mapped," Hogg added.

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