We are engaged in The Southern Hemisphere Narrow-Line Seyfert 1 Infrared Survey. Narrow-Line Seyfert 1 (NLSy1) galaxies may be a young, fast-growing phase of active galactic nuclei (AGN).

Space is big. It’s so big that the brightest known object in the Universe can be so far away that it looks to us like a dim, red pinpoint as shown in the image above. Not much different from the multitude of small red stars that make up the bulk of the Milky Way. But with the X-shooter instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope, we’ve discovered that the black hole powering this brightest of objects, the quasar SMSS J2157-3602, has a mass of 34 billion solar masses – the biggest black hole in the early universe!