Bhargav Vaidya

Sunspots are traces of magnetic fields that emerge on the surface. They live their own lives: spots closer to the equator tilt more, while those farther away tilt less. These two effects, like two knobs on an old radio, control how much magnetic field reaches the Sun's poles and accumulates there for the next cycle.

In the first few hundred million years after the Big Bang, the universe was a dark ocean in which the first stars and black holes ignited. Some of those black holes shot out narrow jets of plasma traveling at nearly the speed of light. If such a jet points straight at Earth, we see it as a bright spot: a blazar.