A Distant Quasar’s Brilliant Light

The arrow in this image, taken by a ground-based telescope, points to a distant quasar, the brilliant core of an active galaxy residing billions of light-years from Earth. As light from this faraway object travels across space, it picks up information on galaxies and the vast clouds of material between galaxies as it moves through them. The Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph aboard NASA's Hubble Space Telescope decoded the quasar's light to find the spectral "fingerprints" of highly ionized (energized) oxygen, which had mixed with invisible clouds of hydrogen in intergalactic space. The quasar's brilliant beam pierced at least four separate filaments of the invisible hydrogen laced with the telltale oxygen. The presence of oxygen between the galaxies implies there are huge quantities of hydrogen in the universe.