Two teams of astronomers led by researchers at the University of Cambridge have looked back nearly 13 billion years, when the Universe was less than 10 percent its present age, to determine how quasars - extremely luminous objects powered by supermassive black holes with the mass of a billion suns - regulate the formation of stars and the build-up of the most massive galaxies. These images are a comparison of outflows from telescope observation and computer simulation. Credit: Tiago Costa Using a combination of data gathered from powerful radio telescopes and supercomputer simulations, the teams found that a quasar spits out cold gas at speeds up to 2000 kilometres per second, and across distances of nearly 200,000 light years - much farther than has been observed before. How this cold gas - the raw material for star formation in galaxies - can be accelerated to such high speeds had remained a mystery.
Read more about Galactic 'Hailstorm' In The Early Universe
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