In the Beginning: Dark matter builds galaxies, feeds quasars

Cosmologists say they’ve found compelling evidence that massive galaxies were already in place when the universe was less than a billion years old. Aided by vast amounts of unseen matter, these galaxies pulled in enough material to produce the cosmos’ first supermassive black holes and fuel the first quasars, the researchers report.

Astronomers have been astonishingly successful in finding distant quasars, beacons of light hundreds of times brighter than the galaxies in which they’re thought to reside.