Sean Morrison

In the Large Magellanic Cloud, a galaxy that orbits our Milky Way, astronomers have caught five stars that look like fossils from the very distant past. They contain almost no metals, only one-hundredth to one-thousandth of what the Sun has, but they have tens of times more carbon.

In 1963, Maarten Schmidt unraveled the nature of quasars — distant active nuclei outshining entire galaxies. Since then, we've learned that at their hearts lurk supermassive black holes, converting infalling matter into blinding light.