Artistic animation of a distant quasar surrounded by a gas halo

This animation depicts a quasar in the early Universe; as we zoom out, we notice the quasar is surrounded by a giant gas halo. The quasar, in orange, has two powerful jets and a supermassive black hole at its centre. The gas halo of glowing hydrogen gas is represented in blue. A team of astronomers surveyed 31 distant quasars, seeing them as they were more than 12.5 billion years ago, at a time when the Universe was still an infant, only about 870 million years old. They found that 12 quasars were surround