Quasars, the most energetic objects in the Universe, can outshine entire galaxies. They are thought to be powered by black holes which have the mass of more than a billion Suns packed into an area about the size of the solar system. Their extreme luminosities make them easy to see at great distances.
The quasar at the center of this image was the most distant known when this image was taken by the Subaru Telescope's CISCO Infrared camera in January 1999. We see the quasar as it was when the Universe was only about one billion years old. Its light has taken an extraordinary long time to reach us.
Due to the expansion of the Universe, this quasar is moving rapidly away from us causing its light to be Doppler shifted to a frequency six times longer than that at which it was emitted. The infrared radiation that forms this image left the quasar as ultraviolet light.
Astronomers speculate that massive objects like quasars could only form in especially dense regions of the early Universe. Galaxies should also form in the space around quasars. The Subaru telescope is being used to look near quasars for the earliest signs of galaxy formation. The faint, red galaxies which can be seen in this image, however, are all located much closer to us.