Thanks to a theory put forward by Albert Einstein over 100 years ago and a happy coincidence, astronomers have discovered radiation being pumped out from the core of a quasar — within which a supermassive black hole lurks.

The team, led by Matus Rybak of Leiden University, made the discovery while hunting for cold gas in the galaxy RXJ1131-1231, an active galaxy with a quasar at its core located around 6 billion light-years from Earth. Despite its immense distance from our planet, RXJ1131-1231 is a popular target for astronomers because of an effect predicted in Einstein's 1915 theory of general relativity called gravitational lensing.

Gravitational lensing occurs when a massive object sits between Earth and a background source — in this case, RXJ1131-1231 and its quasar. The massive obj

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