Manuel Aravena

Quasar W2246–0526 is a beacon lit when the universe was just 1.3 billion years old. Its light has traveled 12.8 billion years to reach us, yet even at such a distance, astronomers have spotted what had eluded them for decades: the gravitational shadow of a black hole.

In the early Universe, just one and a half billion years after the Big Bang, three massive galaxies collided in a small volume of space. Their gravitational dance flung out giant streams of cold gas that stretched for 60 kiloparsecs, a distance twenty times the diameter of our Galaxy.

The kitchen of a distant galaxy isn't limited to its bright disk. Around every star system, there's an invisible cloud of gas, like steam above a pot of soup. Astronomers peeked into this steam around galaxies that appear as they were just one and a half billion years after the Big Bang.

The Universe at 700 million years old was a noisy construction site, just beginning to light up. Telescopes caught a signal from that distant epoch: the galaxy REBELS-25, massive and full of stellar fuel.