Now that your mind has been sufficiently blown, the universe was only 7 percent of its current age when the blazar looked like that. A billion years is nothing in cosmic terms. Blazars from this early in the universe are rare, but analyzing this blazar’s properties can illuminate why so few supposedly formed that far back in the depths of time. “Little is known observationally [about the] time when the Universe was young and the first sources (including active galactic nuclei, AGNs) ionized their surrounding gas in the period called cosmic reionization,” said astronomer Cristiana Spignola, who led a study recently published in