Fiery Galaxy

A brilliant jet of high-energy particles shoots away from a quasar in this artist's concept. The quasar, ULAS J1120+0641, is a disk of super-heated gas spiraling into a black hole roughly two billion times as massive as the Sun. The energy from the disk makes the quasar outshine an entire galaxy of normal stars, even though the disk is only a few times the diameter of our solar system. Quasars are the most powerful sustained objects in the universe. This one is so far away that astronomers see it as it looked 13 billion years ago, when the universe was less than one billion years old. [ESO/M. Kornmesser]