A new theory from University of Arizona researcher Xiaohui Fan predicts that the supermassive black holes which form the core of most galaxies were created only 700 million years after the Big Bang, when the Universe was only 6% of its current age. Fan used data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey to analyze the light of distant quasars, as far away as 13 billion light-years. He found that they contained light elements like hydrogen and helium, but also heavier elements like carbon and iron, which shouldn't have formed so early. But they could be explained if these black holes formed so early.