and time
can be shattered by eruptions so vast they
boggle the mind.
We are just beginning to understand the impact
these outbursts have had on the universe around
us.
That understanding recently took a leap forward.
A team operating at the Subaru Observatory
atop Hawaii's Mauna Kea volcano looked out
to one of the deepest reaches of the universe,
And captured a beam of light that had taken
nearly 13 billion years to reach us.
It was a messenger from a time not long after
the universe was born.
They focused on an object known as a quasar,
short for "quasi-stellar radio source."
It offered a stunning surprise,
A tiny region in its center is so bright that
astronomers believe it's light is coming from
a single object at least a billion times the
mass of our sun.
Inside this brilliant beacon, space suddenly
turns dark,
as it's literally swallowedlikely had their beginnings in the first
generations of stars that literally burst
onto the cosmic scene, in a time of incredible
turbulence.
These stars were born in knots that developed
in the diffuse gas of the early universe.
Gravity drew these knots together. In the
densest regions, stars were born in waves.
Many of them gave birth to black holes.
Within a relatively short time by cosmic standards,
the earliest black holes swallowed more and
more matter, growing to monumental proportions,
becoming quasars.
These quasars, in turn, were fed by the collapse
of matter on a much larger scale.
This computer simulation recreates a region
in the early universe that measured over a
hundred million light years on a side.
It shows what took place in the first one
billion years of cosmic history.
This virtual universe is set in motion by
equations describing the properties of gas,
the