A local research team is the country's first to discover a new quasar.

Seoul National University Professor Im Myeong-shin and his team has detected a quasar with a 1.8-meter telescope at an observatory in North Gyeongsang Province.

The team announced its discovery Monday in an international seminar hosted by the University of Portsmouth in Britain.

A quasar is an enormously bright object at the edge of the universe emitting a massive amount of energy. Its high luminosity is created from matter falling into a super black hole in the centers of distant galaxies.

The new quasar is about 12 billion light years away, and the sixth brightest among tens of thousands of known quasars.

The team also found a supermassive black hole 100 million times heavier than the sun at the center of the quasar.